The Trump administration has removed mentions of climate change from federal government websites, yet the air and water continue to warm and sea levels keep rising. Data on climate change is buried on those sites where it used to be displayed prominently, and still glaciers melt and animals appear where they weren’t before.

No, climate change doesn’t stop just because you ignore it — like tooth decay or that weird rattle in your car, it only gets worse, until you can’t possibly look the other way any longer. In this case, however, the stakes are much higher than a blown engine.

The world's glaciers offer some of the most graphic previews of how climate change can alter the landscape. Peru's "White Mountain Range," for example, may soon need a new name. The ice atop the mountains, the largest glacier chain in the tropics, is melting fast because of rising temperatures, and peaks are turning brown. Associated Press/Karel Navarro

Two separate reports issued in January found that the administration scrubbed hundreds of website pages connected to state and local climate remediation programs, as if refusing to acknowledge climate change makes it any less real.

The Bureau of Land Management removed its climate-change website as well as all mention of climate-change mitigation. The site with information on the Clean Power Plan was removed too, erasing information helpful to the public during a comment period on its future; it probably goes without mentioning that Trump wants to scuttle the plan.

This kind of absurd denial should not be a surprise. Trump, of course, has as his director of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt, who had spent a career opposed to the agency’s central mission of regulating industry and protecting natural resources. Pruitt is now attempting to roll back Obama-era guidelines on automobile fuel efficiency, and pollution from oil and gas operations and coal ash dumps.

Ryan Zinke, secretary of the interior, has taken much the same tack, putting forward plans to drill for oil and gas offshore and on federal lands where it was previously prohibited.

The actions of both Cabinet members reveal an administration handing over the health and well-being of our citizens and our environment to fossil fuel companies. That goes against the science, which says that our continued reliance on oil, gas and coal is making us sick, and hurting the planet in innumerable ways.

To prepare for those sort of policies, then, it helps to get rid of the scientists — and that’s what the Trump administration did. Scientists who were career civil servants — beholden to the data and the facts, not any administration or ideology — could not be fired, so troublemakers were reassigned until they quit. One of them was Joel Clement, a Maine native who was director of the Department of the Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis.

Yesterday, Pruitt went further, announcing a plan to limit the kinds of studies that can be used to drive policy, eliminating from that list landmark research that connects things such as pesticides and pollution to poor health.

Also this week, the Press Herald reported that the usually cold current of water that helps make the rapidly warming Gulf of Maine so productive is nearly 11 degrees above normal for this time of year. The cause, and the ultimate effects, are unclear.

Researchers will work to figure out what is going on there, and in the fields, rivers and mountains where changes have been so rapid and obvious. But when they do, will there be anyone around to listen?

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