"404: Page not found." This is what internet users discover when they arrive on the White House's climate change page in the United States. They're no luckier when they click on the portals and sections related to this topic on the websites of the Departments of State, Defense, Transportation or Agriculture. They've evaporated. On the website of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the section on climate change is no longer accessible from the home page nor in the "environmental topics" tabs.
These examples are far from isolated. Frozen subsidies, a censored nature report, budget cuts... In less than a month, Donald Trump has struck fast and hard. The 47th president of the US, a climate skeptic who regularly casts doubt on the reality and gravity of global warming, has fought on multiple fronts and rained down attacks on climate and environmental science, declaring a "war" on it, to use the term of American science historian Robert Proctor.
"We are entering a golden age of ignorance," warned the professor at Stanford University in California, while climate scientist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, former co-chair of IPCC Group 1, sees this as "obscurantism." "For this administration, scientific facts are dangerous and must be silenced," she said, adding: "It's the heritage of the Enlightenment that's under threat. This is unprecedented in a democratic country, outside of fascist periods."
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