Trump Administration Says It Won’t Publish Major Climate Change Report on NASA Website

The Trump administration on Monday went a step further to ensuring more difficulty toward the finding process of key, legally binding scientific evaluations of how climate change is killing the country and its citizens.

The authoritative, peer-reviewed national climate assessments were made to go dark on the official government websites earlier in this month. These sites inform the state and local government and the populace what they are likely to see in their backyards in the warming world and how best to adapt themselves to it. The White House said at the time that the reports were to be posted at NASA because of a 1990 law, that the space agency said it intended to do.

NASA however terminated such plans on Monday.

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“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. This implies that no assessment material or office of the government science which co-ordinated the work will be on the 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 the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and a co-author of the several previous national climate assessments.

Older reports are yet to be found in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration archives and the recent version of the report and the corresponding interactive atlas may be viewed here.

Obama former white house science adviser and climate scientist John Holdren claimed the administration out rightly lied and had long planned to either 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.”

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“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.

This is why it is good that these reports are seen by state and local governments and by ordinary people, 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, published in 2023, revealed that the issue of climate change is impacting the security, health and livelihoods of people across every sector of the country, differently, and that the minority population is frequently at greater risk than others, most especially Native Americans.

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