Trump’s ‘targeted’ attack on climate data escalates across government

In his second term, the administration of President Donald Trump has waged a systematic attack not only against climate change and research, but the very language and data that undergird modern scientific conclusions, according to experts.

The campaign has data experts scrambling to restore and preserve what they can while struggling to keep pace with the all-out effort that they say extends far beyond what the president was working to accomplish in his first term.

“It feels far more targeted, far more organised, far more rapid,” said Jonathan Gilmour, who works with the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition working on data restoration and preservation.

Among the administration’s efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving to reverse the longstanding finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health. The administration is also deleting, removing and downplaying reams of data and web pages tied to issues like environmental justice.

”(The) prevailing attitude … in the first administration towards climate change … was sort of climate denial. Now, we’re seeing climate erasure,” Gilmour said.

“It goes beyond the sort of standard denial and is far more dangerous. They’re trying to remove the data that we use to make sense of how humans have impacted the world and how those changes affect us and our societies and our health.”