Trump Inauguration News: All Climate Change References Removed From White House Website

On Friday, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, taking over the White House and its accompanying website, which has already been scrubbed of any and all references to climate change.

The removal of the information, spotted on Twitter by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, includes a page dedicated to the topic of climate change and the steps the federal government has taken to counteract it, took place as soon as Trump took the office. That page now produces a “page not found” error message.

A search of Whitehouse.gov now produces no references to “global warming,” and the only references to “climate change” are found on archived pages that have been removed from the site.

In place of the old information is a new “Issues” page dedicated to what the Trump administration is calling the “America First Energy Plan.”

“President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule,” the site now promises.

The Climate Action Plan, put forth by President Barack Obama in 2008, was part of a concerted effort to cut back on carbon pollution in order to help curb the effects of climate change. The plan promoted the preservation of forests, encouraged use of alternative fuels and increased study of climate change.

The removal of any mention of climate change is a sudden but not necessarily unexpected one, as President Trump has expressed his doubts about the existence of climate change in the past despite scientific consensus on the issue.

Trump called the concept of global warming was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” in a tweet sent in 2012 and called it a hoax on several occasions after that—though he later denied ever saying it.

Advisors to the Trump transition team indicated Trump would strip funding of climate change research, calling it a “politicized science.”

The change in administration—and its approach to climate change—has been of great consternation for many scientists. Reports have indicated many researchers have taken to downloading as much government data on climate change as they can out of fear it will be deleted or removed by the Trump administration.

While the official positions of the Obama administration are no longer hosted on the White House’s official website, a version of those pages are still available via the Internet Archive. The service dedicated to preserving the internet has kept close tabs on the White House site—and the climate change page specifically, archiving it every day of the past month.

Prior passing of the White House domain to other Presidents, though one of the more recent traditions of peaceful passing of power, has included a similar wipe of the previous administration. The Obama White House's website will remain accessible at ObamaWhiteHouse.gov, just as the Bush and Clinton White House pages have also been archived.