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EPA Website Removes Climate Science Site From Public View After Two Decades (washingtonpost.com)
Last week there were reports that the EPA climate change website was set to be taken down, though later the EPA denied that. On Friday evening, however, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its website would be "undergoing changes" to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information (paywalled; alternative source). From a report on The Washington Post: One of the websites that appeared to be gone had been cited to challenge statements made by the EPA's new administrator, Scott Pruitt. Another provided detailed information on the previous administration's Clean Power Plan, including fact sheets about greenhouse gas emissions on the state and local levels and how different demographic groups were affected by such emissions. The changes came less than 24 hours before thousands of protesters were set to march in Washington and around the country in support of political action to push back against the Trump administration's rollbacks of former president Barack Obama's climate policies.
After all, who needs data when you have ideology?
I stole this Sig
If I had a dollar for every time Trump said "Only I can / understand X!" where X is anything that is a current social, economic, or political problem, I would be very rich indeed.
Now Trump is saying "X is harder than I thought" more often than not. It seems that items he understood better than the rest of the world are actually hard, and he's just finding out.
There is a scientific basis for this, it is called the Dunning Kruger effect. The short version is, "if you don't know anything about it, your confidence in your statements and actions are high". So we have a President that goes in swinging his fists, and winds up making the situation worse.
The EPA measurements are not privately funded, they are paid for with your tax dollars. As they are not part of a national security agenda, withholding that data is denying your the fruits of your tax payments.
An analogy would be if Trump decided to close a the National Parks permanently for public visitation, only permitting his hand-picked cadre visitation rights. Another analogy would be him "withholding tax preparation information" from tax payers that didn't agree with his agenda (but of course, not withholding on tax prosecution).
We are going to live with the impact of global warming, whether that impact is better or worse than our projected expectations. By pulling this information offline, Trump's directives are for us to live with the impact in the blind. It is as if to "solve the traffic problem" we banned all radio broadcast of traffic accidents and freeway slowdowns.
I hope Trump supporters realize that they are losing access to the science they have purchased. Science can be a tricky field, where one can make mistakes in understanding what is behind an observation; but, closing one's eyes to observation is not going to advance any field. What did Trump give in return for taking your paid-for observations away from you?