Earlier this month, President Donald Trump mentioned the brutal winter storm hitting the U.S. and asked, in all caps, “Whatever happened to global warming?” The ignorance of this statement is one thing, but easily explained: rising temperatures are linked to more extreme weather, including colder winter storms as melting ice caps tend to push cold air south, creating polar vortices like the one we’re experiencing. We can think of climate change as a pendulum: as it intensifies, it swings from one extreme to another, hot and cold and dry and wet. But Trump, who has called climate change a “con job,” would rather people ignore the data on this growing crisis, because if we can’t measure it, maybe we won’t notice it’s happening.
In the last year, the Trump administration have enacted a systemic purge of government-supported climate science initiatives and data. The U.S. government website climate.gov no longer mentions human-caused climate change; the National Climate Assessments have been scrubbed from government websites; the National Center for Atmospheric Research is slated for a complete dismantling; and over 3,000 datasets collected by the government’s constellation of science agencies are gone or tampered with beyond recognition.
