In response to criticism from scientists who claim it will impede the country’s attempts to prepare for increasingly severe droughts, floods, and heat waves, the Trump administration shut down a federal website on Monday that featured reports and studies on climate change that were required by Congress.
All five versions of the National Climate Assessment report and a wealth of material about the effects of global warming on the United States were removed, as was the website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, globalchange.gov.
They are openly accessible documents. Peter Gleick, a climate and water scientist from California who co-authored the first National Climate Assessment in 2000, described it as scientific suppression at its worst. This is book burning in the modern era.
Congress mandated the climate reports, and even without the website, there will be other ways to access them, Gleick said. However, the American public will find it increasingly difficult to locate this information.
The White House did not immediately comment on the website’s takedown.
According to an executive order signed by Trump in May, his administration is dedicated to reestablishing the gold standard for science in order to guarantee that federally funded research is open, thorough, and that the most reputable, trustworthy, and unbiased scientific data is used to inform federal decisions.
The president used a climate science example, stating that federal agencies had previously employed a worst-case warming scenario based on improbable hypotheses.
A 1990 statute established the U.S. Global Change Research Program and required the preparation of climate assessments every four years. However, hundreds of scientists and other specialists who had started writing the most recent National Climate Assessment report were fired by the Trump administration in April.
According to Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who authored four earlier iterations of the climate assessment report, “American taxpayers paid for this scientific information, and they have a right to have it.” Whether you’re a farmer, homeowner, business owner, city manager, or anybody else who genuinely wants to secure a secure and resilient future for themselves and their children, this information is, in my opinion as a scientist, vital to make wise decisions for the future.
According to Hayhoe, the 1990 statute requires the National Climate Assessments to be made available digitally and the research results of the program to be accessible to all federal departments and agencies.
Environment & Climate
The most recent national climate assessment report was being prepared by more than 400 experts. The Trump administration sent them all an email dismissing them.
An interactive atlas depicting anticipated changes in hot and cold days, rainfall totals, and other effects per degree of warming was one of the website’s many resources, according to Hayhoe.
The climate is changing more quickly than at any other point in human history, and we know that we will face the repercussions if we don’t adapt and strengthen the resilience of all of our systems, including our infrastructure, food and water systems, and health systems, according to Hayhoe.
According to her, the National Climate Assessments have assisted Americans in overcoming the physiological gap.
“It informs people in your area about what is happening and what will happen, and how it affects your home, your insurance rates, your water, your food, and the plants and animals that you see around you,” she added.
More than 200 documents were available on the globalchange.gov website through Monday. They included Arctic, agricultural, and human health studies as well as the research program’s annual submissions to Congress. Some of the reports were reprinted from other sources, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Numerous articles, instructional podcasts, and films on subjects including drought, biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, and sea level rise were also available on the website.
The Fifth National Climate Assessment, billed as the leading source of authoritative information on the risks, impacts, and responses to climate change in the United States, was the main item on the homepage.
However, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is in charge of the assessments, has seen a reduction in funding under the Trump administration.
A little yellow banner that said, “The operations and structure of the [U.S. Global Change Research Program] are currently under review,” appeared at the top of the website around April 10.
The nonprofit Internet Archives Wayback Machine, which maintains site snapshots to assist in tracking changes, still has access to earlier iterations of the website.
The website’s closure follows the Trump administration’s takedown of climate.gov, another website run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That happened after a large number of the employees who had worked on the site were allegedly let go. (Users are now sent to noaa.gov/climate from the climate.gov page.)
The new NOAA website, according to Gleick, is a poor replacement for the wealth of information that was previously accessible. According to him, the removal of websites that present scientific studies on the effects of fossil fuels and rising greenhouse gas concentrations on global warming seems to be an attempt to conceal the dangers from the general population.
Following the firing of the team working on the Sixth National Climate Assessment, Hayhoe and other climate scientists said they are still unsure of the Trump administration’s plans for the next report that is mandated by Congress.
According to Gleick, the country faces a greater peril if we fail to do the new evaluations required to comprehend the most recent findings on climate threats. Without any evaluation of its worth or significance, it appears that everything relating to climate change is being either severely reduced or eradicated entirely.
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