The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly removed the fact that human activity is driving climate change from a handful of pages on its website.
The information was deleted from one webpage titled “Causes of Climate Change,” and another that tracks the impacts of the global warming in the United States.
The changes comes as the Trump administration takes aggressive action to boost oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is the main driver of global warming. Mr. Trump, who calls climate change a “hoax,” has eliminated climate regulations and made it easier to develop fossil fuels and harder to build renewable energy like wind and solar power.
Chris Wright, the energy secretary, commissioned five climate skeptics to write a report that downplayed the seriousness of global warming. And the E.P.A. under Administrator Lee Zeldin is poised to eliminate a scientific finding that climate change threatens human health, a move that would erase the federal government’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other planet-warming pollution.
“E.P.A. is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change,” Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization.
She called the online changes to taxpayer-funded government websites troubling and “part of an ongoing attack on science” by the Trump administration.
Brigit Hirsh, a spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin, said the Trump administration is focused on protecting human health, rather than what she called “left-wing political agendas.”
“This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult,” Ms. Hirsch said in a statement. She noted that the older web pages have been archived and are still available online.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, said he recently discovered that the E.P.A. had removed from its website information on climate change “indicators” — trends about heat waves, rising sea levels and other effects.
It had been a “rich resource for educators,” Mr. Swain said, adding that he frequently referred to the site’s data, charts and other information during his lectures.
Then he noticed that the webpage about the causes of climate change no longer listed the primary cause — human activity. Instead, the pages offers other possible causes, like changes in the sun’s energy and volcanic eruptions.
Previously, the page noted that since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that “changed the earth’s climate.” It detailed the amounts of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are released into the atmosphere each year from tailpipes, smokestacks and leaking oil and gas wells.
According to data from the Wayback Machine, a digital repository, the changes appear to have been made sometime after Oct. 8.
Scientists said other data on the Causes of Climate Change page are accurate. For example, the page still notes that solar variations “have played little role in the climate changes observed in recent decade.”
And elsewhere on the E.P.A. site, human causes of global warming are still noted on a page labeled ‘Future of Climate Change.”
Human activity is unequivocally the leading driver of climate change. Even the Trump administration has acknowledged that scientific consensus, releasing a sweeping report in 2017 finding that the long-term warming trend is “unambiguous,” and there is “no convincing alternative explanation” that anything other than humans are to blame.
“It’s not that complicated,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “Humans are doing it. That can be the whole page.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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