Doyle Rice | USA TODAY

Buzz60

The federal government will release a major climate change report – Volume II of the National Climate Assessment – on Black Friday, typically one of the slowest news days of the year.

“It’s an absolute disgrace to bury the truth about climate impacts in a year that saw hundreds of Americans die during devastating climate-fueled megafires, hurricanes, floods, and algal blooms," said National Wildlife Federation president Collin O’Mara in a statement.

Volume II is expected to detail a range of current and future climate change impacts and again warn that the Earth is warming, humans are the cause, and the already serious impacts – such as the current California wildfires – are only going to get worse, Climate Central said.

The new report should also have more of a regional focus, as demand rises for more local information on risks and consequences, said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central.

Branden Camp, AP

The report is also slated to contain a new chapter focusing exclusively on the U.S. Caribbean territories such as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

President Donald Trump, a repeated skeptic of climate change, took to Twitter on Wednesday night to again express his doubts, using the especially cold Thanksgiving forecast as an example.

"Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?" the president tweeted.

Volume I of the report was released a year ago. It outlined the current understanding of the science behind climate change and was described as the largest, most comprehensive U.S.-focused report ever produced about our warming world.

As first mandated by Congress in the late 1980s, the assessment is prepared every four years by the nation's top scientists from 13 agencies. It's meant as a reference for the president, Congress and the public.

The World Resources Institute said it "will be an invaluable tool for leaders who want to protect their citizens."

Why release it on what's practically a national holiday? Perhaps it because "we know climate change is not a priority for this administration," Placky said. In 2017, President Donald Trump said he planned to withdraw the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate agreement, which requires countries to establish ambitious targets to reduce the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming.

He once also tweeted that global warming was a "hoax."

Placky also recalled that the previous assessment, in 2014, was released by President Barack Obama with a huge rollout at the White House.

O'Mara of the wildlife federation said that "releasing the National Climate Assessment on Black Friday won’t obscure the fact that authorities are still identifying bodies in California’s unprecedented megafires, Florida is still dealing with toxic algae outbreaks fueled by warmer water, and Americans are still picking up the pieces from Hurricanes Florence and Michael and Typhoon Yutu that were worsened by climate change."

Meteorologist Angela Fritz with the Capital Weather Gang asked: "Is there any way it could be buried more? How about New Years Eve at 9 pm, guys?"

The Thanksgiving-holiday release comes more than two weeks earlier than the original planned release at the American Geophysical Union annual conference in December, according to Climate Nexus.

Another possible reason for releasing a report about global warming this Friday could be because the weather will be near-record cold in the heavily populated and media-saturated northeastern U.S.