NBC News:

Two government websites on climate change survive in the Trump era

Reports of climate science being scrubbed from U.S. government websites arrived early in President Donald Trump’s tenure. And the hits keep coming. From the Environmental Protection Agency, to the Energy Department, to the State Department and beyond, references to climate change, greenhouse gases and clean energy keep disappearing.

But even as some corners of the Trump administration sow a cyber garden fertile for the fossil fuel industry, a pair of websites funded by the federal government have proclaimed an unvarnished view of the dangers of carbon-driven climate change.

The two sites, Climate.gov and CLEANet.org, have expanded to more than 700 entries and collectively drew more than 68,000 page views in May, a more than 50 percent increase from the year before. And the lessons delivered by the two sites — about the threat posed by a planet warmed by human actions — extends well beyond that core audience. That’s because both sites are aimed at teachers, who say they use the taxpayer-supported websites to create lessons on everything from increasing CO2 levels to threatened biodiversity to the potential of solar power.

The mere existence of the sites might be a surprise to some in hyper-partisan Washington, where news outlets have been reporting for months about federal departments eliminating or toning down reports on the global warming threat. The durability of Climate.gov and CLEANet.org websites shows that — even under the administration of a president who once denied climate change as a “hoax” — mainstream views of global warming can survive and even thrive.

“In a lot of the federal government, scientists are continuing to do their jobs and to be heard.”

“I think these sites show that in a lot of the federal government, scientists are continuing to do their jobs and to be heard,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy. “They are publishing data and sharing information with the American public, until they are told to do otherwise.”

Full story here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna891806

h/t to Dr. Willie Soon

While NBC News might think that 68,000 page views per month is impressive, in comparison to our regular daily traffic on WUWT, it pales in comparison. For example, here is a screencap from my WordPress dashboard from yesterday, July 16th, which was a fairly typical summer day for WUWT. Note that it shows 92,467 page views in one day.

And here is the last two weeks: (data as of 9AM PST 07/17/18)

In the summer, we typically have about 20% lower traffic than we do in the fall through spring period, which has weekdays that are often well in excess of 100,000 page views.

While the traffic now isn’t as much as it used to be in the heady days post-climategate, WUWT still exceeds any other climate related website in views, despite our detractors.

The overall trend for interest in climate has been down according to Google trends, which looks for keyword searches. Graph by Google Trends, annotations mine:

Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Global%20warming,Climate%20change

What’s most interesting is that while there’s been a slow, almost imperceptible increase in the phrase “climate change”, the search phrase “global warming” is getting far less use than it did when data was first collected, back in 2004. Right now, both “climate change”, and “global warming” have low interests.

A clearer illustration of the failure of “messaging” about the urgency of climate change could not be made.

For as long as I am able, WUWT will continue.

Thanks to everyone who has stood with me, who donated to keep WUWT going after seeing what we are up against, such as cyber-attacks, hatemail, and Google’s traffic throttling policy, among other things.

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