Ex-NOAA team launches Climate.us after Trump admin shutdown
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- Rebecca Lindsey and other former Climate.gov staff launched Climate.us late last month after the NOAA site was shut down to comply with an executive order on "gold standard science," drawing roughly 800,000 page views in its first two weeks versus the original site's ~1 million monthly views.
- The Environmental Protection Agency removed at least 80 webpages about the causes, indicators, and effects of climate change in December, and its page on climate causes now emphasizes natural processes without listing human activity as a direct driver, according to the article.
- The National Climate Assessments, congressionally mandated reports released every four years, vanished last summer, prompting the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society to invite manuscripts to preserve the research momentum of what would have been the sixth assessment.
- The American Geophysical Union has assembled roughly 100 experts globally to make environmental datasets more resilient to political interference and is hosting an academic network so U.S. scientists can still contribute to IPCC reports after the U.S. withdrew.
- Adam Smith moved NOAA's billion-dollar weather and climate disaster tracking program to nonprofit Climate Central, where it took nearly a year to restore the same data and methods back to their NOAA-era functionality.
- Climate.us runs with three full-time staff versus roughly eight who worked the original NOAA site, and Lindsey said researchers had to crowdsource funding while some scientists declined to put their names on materials due to fear of retaliation.
- Sonia Wang of the Data Foundation warned that advocates tend to focus on rebuilding the visible "fountain" of public platforms while ignoring the fragile "plumbing" of data infrastructure that often depends on a single longtime maintainer.
Why it matters: The U.S. government had been the dominant public source of accessible, vetted climate science, and the article documents how a patchwork of nonprofits and independent efforts — operating with roughly a third of the staff and unstable philanthropic funding — is trying to fill that vacuum. Experts quoted warn this rescue effort cannot match the federal government's reach or instant public trust, leaving a major gap for teachers, policymakers, and the public. The structural lesson, per advocates, is that data preservation now needs to be written into law rather than left vulnerable to political shifts.
