The Trump administration on Monday took another step to make it harder to find major, legally mandated scientific assessments of how climate change is endangering the nation and its people.
Earlier this month, the official government websites that hosted the authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments went dark. Such sites tell state and local governments and the public what to expect in their backyards from a warming world and how best to adapt to it. At the time, the White House said NASA would house the reports to comply with a 1990 law that requires the reports, which the space agency said it planned to do.
But on Monday, NASA announced that it aborted those plans.
"The USGCRP (the government agency that oversees and used to host the report) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov's data," NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. That means no data from the assessment or the government science office that coordinated the work will be on NASA, she said.
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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