EPA ordered to delete climate change page from its website

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency received orders from the administration of President Donald Trump to delete the extensive climate change information listed on its official website, according to two unnamed EPA employees who spoke to Reuters.

The sources claim that the agency's communications team received orders to scrub its website of the climate change page, which lists information ranging from greenhouse gas emissions data to the observable links between climate change and extreme weather patterns.

"If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear," one of the EPA employees told Reuters.

After Trump, a longtime global warming skeptic, took office on Jan. 20, references to climate change similarly vanished from the official White House website, replaced by Trump's "America first energy plan." 

As Wired reported Thursday, a group of hackers, scientists and librarians anticipated that the Trump administration might order the deletion of information on climate change from the EPA's website, and had been working tirelessly to preserve government data before it was lost.

Myron Ebell, Trump's appointed EPA transition team leader, also seemed unsurprised by the order to scrub the pages.

"My guess is the web pages will be taken down, but the links and information will be available," he told Reuters.

The decision to remove the information comes on the heels of a gag order issued by the Trump administration to prevent employees at the EPA and the Department of Agriculture from posting on social media or speaking to the press (the latter office has since had its gag order lifted amid public outcry).

On Tuesday night, the Twitter account for Badlands National Park — which is overseen by the National Parks Service — began tweeting out climate facts.The tweets have since been deleted.