Shhhh. Someone in the Federal government wants to keep a secret. Someone—though no one is saying who—does not want you to know that the Federal government is panicked about climate change.

They should be. A new government report—1,600 pages, two and a half years of work, hundreds of authors, 13 participating agencies—warns that by the end of the century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in losses and damage. All the evidence points to human emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide as the cause. “There is clear and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern society has experienced, and this warming trend can only be explained by human activities,” David Easterling of NOAA, director of NCA4’s technical support unit, said on a Friday conference call with journalists. “After mid-century, how much the climate changes will depend primarily on release of greenhouse gases.”

The new report is volume two of the 4th National Climate Assessment (volume I, focusing on climate change science, came out in 2017). It’s the result of a 1990 law mandating a quadrennial US version of the climate reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (like one published last month, which says the worst effects of climate change might hit as soon as 2040—real soon, y’all). NCA4 was supposed to come out in December. About a week ago, the feds informed its authors it might be coming out a wee bit earlier. On Wednesday, the press release went out: They were publishing the report on November 23, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, busiest shopping day of the year.

It is the most Friday-News-Dumpiest of all possible Friday News Dumps.

On the conference call, a spokesperson for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration repeatedly asked journalists on the line to ask about the report’s substance, and to refer questions about its timing to Michael Kuperberg, the executive director of the US Global Change Research Program. (He has not yet answered my email.) Another call participant explained the timing this way: “There are two major international climate related conferences taking place in early December,” David Reidmiller, director of the National Climate Assessment, said. “We wanted to get the NCA out into the public sufficiently in advance of those meetings to ensure the community had time to review them.”

No one would answer why Black Friday was a better option for publishing NCA4 (and a related big report on carbon in North America) than, say, three days later, on Monday of the following week. Maybe the government just thought it’d be nice to offer a Black Friday discount on the apocalypse. “This is a report that has not been altered in any way based on any political views or ideological perspectives. It is the report the authors put together and the most conclusive and authoritative report in the world, frankly, about how climate change is going to affect a particular country. I’m very happy about that,” Andrew Light, a senior fellow at World Resources International who worked on NCA4’s chapter on mitigation, tells me. “The message this administration is sending out by putting it out on Friday is perfectly clear—that this is not an administration that is engaging on this issue, and they do not, frankly, have an interest in helping other communities to engage and prepare on this issue. And that’s a tragedy.”

The tragedy, according to the new report, will be shaped by profound effects on US ecosystems and industries. How bad those effects will be depends on whether emissions continue on the same trend line as they are today. NCA4 authors used widely agreed-upon models of the future called Representative Concentration Pathways, scenarios built for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that take into account emissions, aerosols, land use, and a bunch of other factors. At the very worst end, where emissions increase until 2100, is a future called RCP8.5. (The number refers to a change in energy flux at the top of the atmosphere of 8.5 watts per square meter, an outcome of lots more heat energy trapped inside; today’s climate trend lines map to RCP8.4) But the NCA’s authors also looked at a scenario where humans manage to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. That’s RCP4.5.