'Downright Orwellian': In Midst of Planetary Emergency, Trump Admin Takes Down Website Hosting Influential US Climate Report
"This is the modern version of book burning," said one scientist.
Amidst an ever-worsening climate emergency, the Trump administration this week took down the website hosting the U.S. government’s preeminent climate assessment, sparking outcry from experts who have worked previous versions of the report.
Considered the definitive body of research about how planetary warming is transforming the nation, the National Climate Assessment—which is required by Congress to be published every few years—gives a rundown of how global warming is impacting different sectors of the economy, ecosystems, and communities.
The five assessments that have been published so far were previously available through the website globalchange.gov, but the address stopped working Monday afternoon, according to The New York Times. As of Wednesday morning the website was still down.
However, it is still possible to access some of the climate research. The fifth assessment is available through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. An archived version of the fifth assessment is also available via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. According to a NASA spokesperson who spoke to NPR, all five editions of the assessment will also be available on NASA's website, though it's not clear when.
"It's critical for decision-makers across the country to know what the science in the National Climate Assessment is. That is the most reliable and well-reviewed source of information about climate that exists for the United States," Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist who coordinated the 2014 version of the assessment, told The Associated Press.
"This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts," she added.
“They're public documents. It's scientific censorship at its worst," said Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist who worked on the version of the assessment published in 2000, told The Los Angeles Times. "This is the modern version of book burning."
Howard Crystal, legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity's energy justice program, said in a statement on Tuesday that "it's downright Orwellian for the Trump administration to take the nation's premier climate reports and just yank them offline."
"Hiding these congressionally mandated reports won't make climate change go away, but it will leave Americans uninformed and unprepared," he said.
Earlier in April, the Trump administration enacted cuts to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which oversees the production of the National Climate Assessment, and later that month dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts working on the next version of the report, the 6th National Climate Assessment.
Meanwhile, a new budget document outlining fiscal year 2026 spending for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) details deep cuts to climate research at the agency, including the elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, though some of its activities would be transferred to the National Ocean Service and the National Weather Service.
The budget proposal "eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. It also does not fund Regional Climate Data and Information, Climate Competitive Research, the National Sea Grant College Program, Sea Grant Aquaculture Research, or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program," according to the document.
With the termination of Climate Competitive Research, which funds academic institutions to do climate-related research, "NOAA will no longer support climate research grants," the document also states.
"That's it—with that statement, the administration signals its intent to have NOAA, arguably the world's leading oceanic and atmospheric governmental organization, completely abandon climate science," wrote Alan Gerard, a meteorologist who previously worked for NOAA.
