NIH institute purges climate change references, but not very well

Last week, one of NIH's institutes, the National Institute for Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS), did something rather mysterious. The institute purged references to climate change on its website by replacing the phrase "climate change" with "climate."

For example, a page formerly titled "Health Impacts of Climate Change" is now titled "Health Impacts of Climate," a title that obscures the main point of the page's content, which is all about climate change. Another page formerly called "Climate Change and Human Health" is now called "Climate and Human Health." Ironically, the web addresses of both these pages still contains the term 'climatechange':

•   https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/health_impacts/
•   https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/

which is something of a smoking gun showing the after-the-fact alterations. The attempted purge was first revealed by the nonprofit group EDGI, a group dedicated to addressing "potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy." The Washington Post revealed that these changes were made by Christine Flowers, the NIEHS Director of Communications. As quoted in the Post, Flowers explained that:

"It’s a minor change to a title page, but the information we provide remains the same. In fact, it’s been expanded."

True, the contents of these pages seem to be unchanged. But in that case, why change the titles and headings? Clearly something more is afoot. Is NIEHS trying to pretend that climate change isn't real, or that it has no effect on human health? If so, this would undermine the very mission of the institute. Are the NIEHS staff fearful that one of Trump's minions will attack them for describing objective scientific facts? If so, perhaps they should get another job.

NIEHS's attempt to re-write its own history has been woefully ineffective. It's easy to find other NIEHS webpages devoted to climate change, such as:
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/climate-change
which has the title "Climate Change" right at the top, and which links to a major report called "The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States: A Scientific Assessment." There's also the NIEHS Climate Change and Environmental Exposures Challenge, a competition sponsored by NIEHS to create graphical visualizations showing the effect of climate change on health.

The WashPost story did not mention whether the NIEHS director, Dr. Linda Birnbaum or her boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, had plans to restore the original language to the website. I've written to them both to ask, and I'll post an update here if they do.