Human activity is driving climate change; that’s a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.
But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a webpage explaining climate change’s causes.
It’s yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.
An EPA page titled “Causes of Climate Change” once began by directly noting that “since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have released large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which has changed the earth’s climate.”
Now, that page begins by stating, “Natural processes are always influencing the earth’s climate and can explain climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.” (The previous version of the website is still available via online archives.)
A purging of scientifically accurate information
Daniel Swain, a climate and weather scientist at UCLA, noticed the change earlier this week. It began when a weather communications colleague reached out to him about the EPA’s “Indicators of Climate Change” section being offline.
That section wasn’t just one web page, but an entire subdomain that included data, maps, and detailed stories on certain climate change indicators like shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels. It was often used by experts, including Swain himself, to grab ready-made info graphics and other resources.
Swain looked into that issue, and found that the link now redirects to a broken web page. Then he started digging into other webpages from the EPA.
“It immediately became clear that there had been a much larger scale, essentially, purging of scientifically accurate information from a large portion of the EPA public facing website,” he says.
The EPA also removed a sub page on climate change impacts that discussed events like floods and heatwaves. But even more concerning than certain pages disappearing, Swain says, was the change to the “causes” webpage removing the mention of human activity.
“That had been, not removed, but dramatically modified to the point where it is now false,” he says.
The move isn’t necessarily surprising from the Trump administration, Swain adds. But he calls it a “pretty clearly deliberate effort to shift the public facing view on formally authoritative federal agency documents, communications, and websites to align with partisan political priorities.”
It’s not exactly clear when these changes occurred, but the Wayback Machine shows the comments about human activity still on the EPA website in early October.
While nearly all information about human-caused climate change has been scrubbed from the website, one stray reference to it remains, at the end of a section discussing how volcanic eruptions have previously released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“Volcanic particles from a single eruption do not produce long-term climate change because they remain in the atmosphere for a much shorter time than greenhouse gases,” that section currently reads. “In addition, human activities emit more than 100 times as much carbon dioxide as volcanoes each year.”
In a statement to the New York Times, a spokesperson for EPA administrator Lee Zeldin noted that the archives still existed, and said that the Trump administration is focused on human health over “left-wing political agendas.”
“This agency no longer takes marching orders from the climate cult,” she added.
(A separate EPA webpage, titled “Future of Climate Change,” does still point to human causes of global warming.)
Humans have caused more than 100% of climate change
The science on climate change is clear: Human activity is the cause.
In fact, previous climate scientists’ analyses have found that humans have caused more than 100% of global warming since 1950.
That’s possible because of the fact that earth’s natural cycles have actually slightly cooled the planet over the last century. “Essentially, human causes have not only caused the warming that we’ve seen, but it’s also offset a bit of cooling that otherwise would have occurred,” Swain says.
“Human caused warming is, for all intents and purposes, the singular cause of contemporary climate change,” he adds.
Disinformation and AI confusion
There are other resources for accurate climate information that note human activity as its cause.
But the EPA’s move to remove that information points to a broader issue, in which the Trump administration is eroding credibility in government information and its institutions at large. The same thing has played out on the CDC and Health and Human Services websites, specifically concerning vaccines.
To Swain, altering a page on climate change causes shows intent to deceive.
“They chose not to delete that page. They heavily modified it to the point of scientific incorrectness,” he says. “That is choice . . . and it is arguably something that is even more deeply concerning, because it shows a willingness, essentially, to lie, and to present information that is false.”
This move from the EPA could also have ricochet effects. Consider AI overviews and LLMs, Swain says. If they re-aggregate these webpages from the EPA, they may also regurgitate those falsehoods.
“The algorithm is not capable of differentiating truth from fiction,” he says. “The challenge is that it is getting more and more difficult to find consistent, reliable, and authoritative sources for this kind of information.”
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