The Trump administration on Monday advanced another move that complicates access to critical, legally required scientific studies regarding the threat climate change poses to the nation and its citizens.
Earlier this month, key government websites, which contained the definitive, peer-reviewed national climate assessments, were taken offline. These sites provided vital information to state and local governments and the public about the local impacts of a warming planet and strategies for adaptation. In response, the White House indicated that NASA would take on the responsibility of hosting these reports in accordance with a 1990 law mandating their publication, with NASA expressing its intention to fulfill this role.
But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans.
NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens clarified in an email, “The USGCRP (the government agency formerly responsible for hosting the report) has fulfilled its legal obligations by delivering its reports to Congress. NASA is not legally required to host data from globalchange.gov.” Consequently, neither the assessment data nor the contributions from the coordinating government science office will be accessible through NASA, she added.
On July 3, NASA put out a statement that said: “All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring continuity of reporting.”
“This document was written for the American people, paid for by the taxpayers, and it contains vital information we need to keep ourselves safe in a changing climate, as the disasters that continue to mount demonstrate so tragically and clearly,” said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She is chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and co-author of several past national climate assessments.
Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s library and the latest report and its interactive atlas can be seen here.
Former Obama White House science adviser and climate scientist John Holdren accused the administration of outright lying and long intended to censor or bury the reports.
“The new stance is classic Trump administration misdirection,” Holdren said. “In this instance, the administration offers a modest consolation to quell initial outrage over the closure of the globalchange.gov site and the disappearance of the National Climate Assessments. Then, two weeks later, they snatch away the consolation with no apology.”
“They simply don’t want the public to see the meticulously assembled and scientifically validated information about what climate change is already doing to our farms, forests, and fisheries, as well as to storms, floods, wildfires, and coast property — and about how all those damages will grow in the absence of concerted remedial action,” Holdren said in an email.
That’s why it’s important that state and local governments and every day people see these reports, Holdren said. He said they are written in a way that is “useful to people who need to understand what climate change is doing and will do to THEM, their loved ones, their property and their environment.”
“Trump doesn’t want people to know,” Holdren wrote.
The most recent report, issued in 2023, found that climate change is affecting people’s security, health and livelihoods in every corner of the country in different ways, with minority communities, particularly Native Americans, often disproportionately at risk.
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