Trump will leave climate change info on EPA website – for now

Melting ice is just one of many indicators of anthropogenic climate change.

So far, Donald Trump’s ban on EPA employees speaking to the media is off to a rocky start – two of the agency’s staffers have already anonymously spoken to Reuters news agency this week to sound the alarm about the incoming President’s continuing efforts to suppress climate science. According to these EPA employees, the agency’s communications team was instructed to remove their website’s climate change page, which included data on emissions and links to global warming research. However, as soon as the news began to spread across the web, the Trump administration appeared to soften its stance.

Now, rather than a purge of climate data, administration officials are framing the order as an “editorial review” of the site’s content. Doug Ericksen, the spokesman for Trump’s team in charge of the agency, told The Hill that the administration doesn’t intend to take down online climate data, and is merely “scrubbing it up a bit, putting a little freshener on it, and getting it back up to the public.” Exactly what means and what kind of slant the administration wants to put on the data is unclear.