The Club PUBlication 07/07/2025

Website hosting national climate reports goes dark
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NEWS SERVICES

​The government website that hosted the federal government's national climate reports, which are mandated by legislation, went offline Monday afternoon.

The website was also one of the main federal sources of information on climate change.

Since 2000, the federal government has regularly published comprehensive reports on how greenhouse gas emissions are changing climate and affecting human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy.

The five published reports had been available at globalchange.gov, but that address stopped working Monday afternoon.  It now displays a "this site can't be reached" error message.

The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires an assessment of climate change to be provided to the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies every four years. Previous National Climate Assessments remain available on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's online archive. They will also be on NASA's website, said Bethany Stevens, a NASA press secretary. The White House did not respond to a request for a comment.

"They're public documents. It's scientific censorship at its worst," said Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist who was one of the authors of the first National Climate Assessment in 2000.

"This is the modern version of book burning."
​In early April, the Trump administration cut funding for future editions of the reports, and later that month, the authors for the next assessment were dismissed. Work on the sixth assessment, scheduled to come out in early 2028, had already begun when the funds and support were cut.

The last climate assessment, which came out in 2023, is used by state and local governments, as well as private companies, to help prepare for the effects of climate-related events including heat waves, floods and droughts.

"This is scientific information that the American taxpayers paid for, and it's their right to have it," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who was an author of four previous versions of the climate assessment report. "It's information that I, as a scientist, can say is absolutely critical to making good decisions for the future, whether you're a farmer, a homeowner, a business owner, a city manager, or anyone really who wants to ensure a safe and resilient future for themselves and for their children."

Hayhoe said the website's many resources had included an interactive atlas of projected changes in hot and cold days, rainfall amounts and other effects per degree of warming.

"Climate is changing faster than any time in human history, and we know that if we don't adapt, if we don't build resilience into all of our systems — our food and water systems, our infrastructure and our health systems — that we will suffer the consequences," Hayhoe said.
She said the National Climate Assessments have helped "bridge the physiological distance" for Americans.

"It tells people in your region, here is what is already happening and here is what is going to happen, and here is how it is affecting your home, your insurance rates, your water, your food, the plants and animals that you see around you," she said.

Until Monday, the website globalchange.gov made available more than 200 publications.

They included the research program's yearly reports to Congress and studies on the Arctic, agriculture and human health. A few were republished reports from other organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The site also hosted dozens of webpages, educational podcasts and videos on topics including sea level rise, greenhouse gases, biodiversity and drought.

Previous versions of the website can still be found using the nonprofit Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which keeps snapshots of sites to help track changes.

The shutdown of the website comes after the Trump administration also took down another site, climate.gov, which had been maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That occurred after much of the staff that had worked on the site were reportedly dismissed.

(The climate.gov website now redirects users to noaa.gov/climate.) Gleick said the new NOAA website is a "pale substitute" for the extensive information that was previously available.

He said he believes the removal of websites with scientific research on global warming, driven by fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases, appears aimed at hiding the risks from the public.

Hayhoe and other climate scientists said they still don't know what the Trump administration's plans are for the next congressionally required report.

"The deeper threat to the country is that we won't do the new assessments that are necessary to understand the latest research on climate threats to the country," Gleick said. "It seems like anything climate related is being either cut to the bone or completely eliminated, with no assessment of its value or importance."

This story contains material from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.