The EPA’s out of the Climate-Science Business. Here’s How to Keep Up

By Grist

03 May 17

The EPA’s out of the climate-science business. Here’s how to keep up.

his weekend, the EPA issued a sizable middle finger to the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out for the People’s Climate March on Saturday by erasing pages of climate info from its website. Late on Friday, the agency announced that they would be replaced with content that “reflect the views of the leadership of the agency.”

Sea-level rise and temperature change are probably issues you consider as settled as, say, the multiplication tables. But this is the administration we’ve been dealt! Once you delete that EPA bookmark from your browser (which we all have, of course), here are a few good resources to call upon going forward. You can’t be the only person who’s never heard of ocean acidification at your next vegan-noodle dinner party.

We’ve ranked them from Saltine-Cracker-In-A-Drought Dry to Get-That-Jellyfish-Outta-My-Foyer Fun:

• The IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) spends a lot of time compiling data on how carbon dioxide is changing the planet. It’s wildly boring, but they know what’s up.


• As federal agencies, NASA and NOAA may eventually face the same censorial fate as the EPA. But until then, they’re filling its void with publicly accessible data on climate change. Check out NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio and surface temperature estimation tool, specifically, as well as NOAA’s State of the Climate Reports.


• Climate Central has a host of interactives that can help you grok phenomena like weather trends, the spread of wildfires, the melting of Arctic sea ice, and the rise of sea levels.


• Zach Labe, a Ph.D. student in earth science at the University of California, Irvine, runs a gorgeous Twitter account, visualizing recent alterations to the Earth, like shifts in Arctic ice shelves.


• For one-off explanations on why and how the climate is changing, we tip our hats to The New York Times and Bloomberg for their comprehensive, easy-to-understand interactive graphics.


• And when all other sources fail, there are always comics.