Another U.S. agency deletes references to climate change on government website

Desdemona Despair

By Jamiles Lartey
23 August 2017

(The Guardian) – The National Institutes of Health deleted multiple references to climate change on its website over the summer, continuing a trend that began when the Trump administration took charge of the dot.gov domain.

The changes were first outlined in a report by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which has been using volunteers to track changes to roughly 25,000 pages across multiple government agencies since Trump took office. EDGI counted five instances in which the term “climate change” was changed to simply “climate” on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) site.

The NIH, an agency of the federal government, is the world’s leading public health research body.

EDGI’s findings can be confirmed by using the internet archive Wayback Machine and looking up the affected NIH pages. The database appears to show the deletion as having occurred between 28 June and 6 July of this year.

The references were altered on pages belonging to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH’s division dedicated to the study of the environment and its effects on human health. NIEHS also removed links to an educational factsheet from two separate pages, and a page dedicated to explaining the environmental impacts of climate change.

The scrubbing was ineffectual, though, as the term was mostly only deleted from page titles and subheadings. “No other language changes were made and the term ‘climate change’ continues to be used in the body text of the page,” EDGI reported. [more]

Another US agency deletes references to climate change on government website