Why Were US Government Climate Report Websites Suddenly Taken Down?

A key U.S. government website that housed the National Climate Assessment has gone offline, leaving scientists, city planners, and ordinary Americans without direct access to the most comprehensive federal report on how climate change is reshaping the country.

The website shut down Monday without explanation. It had offered a user-friendly portal with interactive tools, maps, and detailed information about how climate change affects specific towns and states. Teachers, farmers, health professionals, and judges relied on it to guide decisions on everything from wildfire protection to urban planning.

Now, those tools are gone.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech and long-time author of the report, said the shutdown erases a vital public resource. “If you are a human being in the United States, your life is already being impacted by climate change whether you know it or not,” she said. “The National Climate Assessment was one of the primary tools connecting those dots.”

Federal law requires the report every four years. The last edition, published in 2023, described how climate change threatens U.S. communities in ways that are expensive, deadly, and increasingly hard to ignore. But plans for the next edition in 2027 were scrapped this spring when the Trump administration dismissed the staff overseeing the project and cancelled contracts with outside firms helping manage it.

The White House has not explained the move or provided a timeline for restoring access.

Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona scientist who coordinated the 2014 assessment, called the blackout dangerous. “It’s a sad day for the United States if it is true that the National Climate Assessment is no longer available,” she said. “This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information.”

Archived versions of the reports still exist. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) hosts a basic version of the latest edition, though it lacks search and navigation tools. The interactive atlas, once hosted separately, remains online through the mapping company Esri, though most users don’t know where to look.

NASA has said it will eventually host the reports, but no date has been announced. Searches on its website return no results. NOAA and NASA did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In recent months, other public-facing climate tools have also been cut or redirected. NOAA’s climate.gov was quietly rerouted, and several social media and public outreach accounts at NASA and NOAA have been taken down.

Holdren called it part of a wider pattern. “It’s just an appalling whole demolition of science infrastructure,” he said.

Jacobs agreed. “Hiding the reports is censoring science. People can’t protect themselves if they don’t know what’s coming.”

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