Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has launched a major effort to limit public access to information about climate change. NASA violated its promise to post it on its own website after the president chaired the official government website of the National Climate Assessment earlier this month.
On Monday, July 14, NASA’s press secretary Bethany Stevens told the Associated Press that NASA will not host any data from GlobalChange.gov, the official website of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The inter-agency program issued a national climate assessment issued every four years, every four years under the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The reports provide authoritative scientific information on climate change risks, impacts and responses after the USGCRP website turned black in early July, with the White House and NASA saying the company will publish the site on its site to comply with the 1990 AP. Obviously, this is no longer the case.
“NASA has no legal obligation to host GlobalChange.gov’s data,” NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email. Fortunately, there are still copies of past reports in the NOAA library, and the latest reports and their interactive map sets can be found here.
The Trump administration essentially removed USGCRP when it evacuated federal employees from their positions in April. It also terminated the program’s contract with ICF International, a technology and policy consulting firm that provides technical, analytical and programmatic support for USGCRP, and in particular its national climate assessment. Later that month, the government dismissed all scientists engaged in the next assessment, which was supposed to be published in 2028. Now, past reports are more unlikely to the public than ever.
Avoiding USGCRP and releasing its national climate assessment is just part of a full-scale attack on U.S. climate information. Since Trump took office in January, thousands of employees (including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NOAA, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have lost their jobs. His administration also freezes climate-related grants, killing major federal climate programs, proposes major cuts to federal research programs, and clears references to climate change on federal websites.
Trump’s efforts to cover up the reality of climate change will have real consequences, but ultimately in vain. Americans face this crisis every day as they deal with new challenges of rising global temperatures. The fifth national climate assessment, published in 2023, warns of the country’s “potentially disastrous outcomes” as climate change intensifies extreme weather. These effects have been felt in many parts of the United States.
In the first half of 2025, multiple serious floods have killed dozens of Americans. Recently, at least two people in New Jersey raised rains on Monday, July 14 triggered flash flooding in much of the Northeast, with more than 100 people in Texas, including at least 36 children in Kerr County during the flooding of the disaster on April 4. Although it is difficult to directly link individual weather events to climate change, many studies show that rising global temperatures are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall in the United States and around the world, thereby increasing flood risk. This is because the warm air increases the evaporation volume and the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold. An atmosphere containing more moisture can produce more intense precipitation events, which is what the United States has experienced recently.
Wildfires are also becoming increasingly difficult to manage. It was obvious in January when more than a dozen fast-moving destructive wildfires destroyed part of Los Angeles. In Arizona, firefighters have been working to contain two active fires near the northern edge of the Grand Canyon, destroying a historic cabin, triggering the evacuation and forcing officials to close this part of the national park on Sunday, July 13. Both fires were on Tuesday, July 15 (Tuesday) until Tuesday, July 15. climate. Human-driven warming plays an important role in this trend, making vegetation that feeds wildfires dry. A study found that climate change could have caused nearly two-thirds of the increase in summer fire weather conditions over the past 40 years.
Americans can see evidence of climate change everywhere. Not only is this deadly flooding and rampant wildfires, but it is a severe heat wave, changing seasons and sunken coastline. In extreme weather conditions, farmers lose their livelihoods, face rising insurance costs for families as well as infrastructure buckling. Making information about this ongoing crisis more difficult will not protect the public from it, but it will make it harder for governments and communities to adapt to them.
