Monday, June 26, 2017

Milwaukee reposts climate change site taken down by US EPA

Props to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett for having the City of Milwaukee repost on its website here the world-renowned scientifically-vetted climate change web pages, studies and findings which the US EPA under Donald Trump has deleted.

One scientist who had managed now-deleted website for five years called its removal "a declaration of war." 

This spring, political officials at the Environmental Protection Agency removed the agency’s climate change website, one of the world’s top resources for information on the science and effects of climate change. 
To me, a scientist who managed this website for more than five years, its removal signifies a declaration of war on climate science by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There can be no other interpretation. 
I draw this conclusion as a meteorologist with a specialization in climate science and as an independent voter who strives to keep my political and scientific views separate. I concede that this specific issue is personal for me, given the countless hours I spent working on the site. But it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity.
Interesting that Scott Walker's WI DNR did the same thing some months ago.

By the way, this is what air quality looked like in New York City as seen from The World Trade Center in 1968, two years before the US Clean Air Act was adopted.




2 comments:

Raven said...

“One scientist who had managed now-deleted website for five years called its removal ‘a declaration act of war.’”

“Act” needs to come out; not found in text quoted further on.

I leave to your discretion insertion of definite article before word “now”. I grew up hearing and then speaking Russian in early life, so text entirely understandable to me without articles. Other readers perhaps not so lucky.

Raven said...

My widowed mother and I moved away from NYC two years before that (when there was not yet a World Trade Center), back to the Midwest after she’d researched several years for a Big Apple pharma company. The sky had been brown for so much of the time that, as the train got two states away and we could see blue overhead, it was like we’d crossed into another world. The track curved, and we could see back to where the city was from the huge dome of brown haze standing high against the horizon.