US government agency drops several 'climate change' references insisting Trump wasn't behind it

A US government agency has dropped several references to “climate change” from its website amid concern over the Trump administration’s denial of the science.

Several references to climate change on headings and menus were replaced by simply “climate” on the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ site and a number of links to a fact sheet on “Climate Change and Human Health” were removed, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) revealed.

However the official who made the changes insisted she had done so simply to clean up the presentation of information and stressed she had not come under any pressure to do so from Trump officials.

Summarising the changes, the EDGI report said: “The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has altered climate change language, updated climate change references, and reduced access to a Web resource with information on climate change and human health across several webpages.

“On the Global Environmental Health pages, the term ‘climate change’ has been changed to ‘climate’ on side menus and page titles. Links to an educational fact sheet about climate change were removed, reducing access to the resource.”

For example, the headline on one page was changed from “Climate Change and Human Health” to “Climate and Human Health”.

Donald Trump has claimed global warming is a hoax, appointed a string of climate science deniers to senior positions in his administration and announced the US with withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

However Christine Flowers, NIEHS’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison director, told The Scientist that “no one from the Trump administration has contacted me about it or given any direction on these web pages or even the topic of climate change”.

She said she made the changes simply to clean up the presentation of information.

“That particular group of web pages is sort of nestled under the global environmental health section. Frankly, if you take the time to look down through those pages, there’s a lot of redundancies,” Ms Flowers said.

“We’re just in the process of trying to compile and bring together a lot of different bits of information that we have around climate, climate change, and health.

“We have all that information that remains provided. But it’s frankly not in that great of an organisational layout now.

“It was just the part of the process of adding information to web pages. Nobody gave me a directive to change anything, nobody said to take the word ‘change’ out.”

Ms Flowers said she was aware of previous controversies about the removal of references to climate change on US government websites when she made the alterations.

“Honestly, I understand that the Environmental Protection Agency has had some challenges, and the US Department of Agriculture has had some challenges to do with the information that they provided on their website,” she said.

“Taking out the word ‘change,’ I felt like ‘climate’ and ‘health’ were still in there – the important parts. There’s plenty throughout the website that has ‘climate change’. So to say that we scrubbed it all from the website, that’s not correct.”