Ex-NOAA Team Launches Climate.us Outside Government
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- Rebecca Lindsey, former lead writer and program manager of NOAA's Climate.gov, was fired in February 2025, and the Trump administration subsequently eliminated the rest of the supporting staff and shut down the website — to comply with an executive order on 'restoring gold standard science.'
- Climate.us, the independent nonprofit replacement built by Lindsey and other former Climate.gov staff, launched late last month on a nongovernmental domain and attracted roughly 800,000 page views in its first two weeks, compared to the old NOAA site's approximately one million monthly views.
- The Trump administration also eliminated the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments last summer and the EPA removed at least 80 webpages about climate change, with the agency's causes page no longer listing human activity as a direct driver of global warming.
- Adam Smith, who previously led NOAA's billion-dollar weather and climate disaster tracking program, moved the project to the nonprofit Climate Central; it took nearly a year to fully restore, and now documents disasters costing $100 million or more back to 1980.
- The American Geophysical Union launched a global initiative with about 100 experts to make environmental datasets resilient against political interference, and is hosting an academic network allowing U.S. scientists to contribute to IPCC reports after the Trump administration withdrew from the group.
- Climate.us operates with just three full-time staff compared to roughly eight at NOAA, required crowdsourced fundraising, and some scientists declined to review materials for the project out of fear of retaliation tied to its federal origins.
Why it matters: Climate.us drew 800,000 page views in two weeks with a three-person team, but experts warn no nonprofit can match the federal government's reach or public trust — leaving a widening gap in vetted climate information as the EPA scrubs human-caused warming from its pages and federal programs disappear.
