A federal website hosting congressionally mandated climate reports has gone dark, eliminating one of the country’s most reliable sources of information about climate change.
The website went offline Monday afternoon, The New York Times first reported, and has not been reinstated. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NOTUS about why the website was taken down and if there was a timeline for its return.
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandates that the federal government publish a National Climate Assessment for the Environmental Protection Agency every four years, examining how changes in the weather and greenhouse-gas emissions affect a number of economic metrics, as well as human and environmental health.
Now, however, users looking to access that data via globalchange.gov are greeted with an error message.
Trending
The most recent climate assessment is still available on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website, although it is missing the interactive atlas portion of the National Climate Assessment.
A spokesperson for NASA told NPR all five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years would be available on NASA’s website at an unknown future date. The interactive atlas, which allows users to zoom in on specific locations, is still available on a website hosted by the mapping software company Esri.
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, according to The Times. Work on the sixth assessment, scheduled to come out in early 2028, had already begun when the cuts took place.
In an X post last week, NOAA’s Climate Program Office wrote in its “final post” that it had made “final updates” to its website.
“In accordance with Executive Order 14303, ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science,’ NOAA is relocating all research products from Climate.gov to NOAA.gov in an effort to centralize and consolidate resources,” the post read. “Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov and its affiliate websites.”
The move to limit access to historical climate data isn’t this administration’s first action against climate research.
NOTUS reported last week the Department of Defense is abruptly shutting down a satellite program that meteorologists say is crucial to hurricane forecasting, just as what’s expected to be an “above-normal” Atlantic hurricane season is picking up.
“Things are being taken away all across the forecasting enterprise. This particular one is going to result in delays in the recognition from [the National Hurricane Center] that storms are strengthening,” James Franklin, who served as National Hurricane Center chief until 2017, told NOTUS. “It’ll result in delays in forecasts of rapid intensification, because often, the first clue that you’re going to have rapid intensification is this imagery.”
—
Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Author
