A small group of former government workers has recreated a valuable climate-science website that had been shuttered last year under the Trump administration.
The new site, climate.us, is an effort by former staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to present climate science previously housed at climate.gov, including data, reports, articles, and congressionally mandated national climate assessments.
The new site is effectively the “first full clone” of climate.gov, said Rebecca Lindsey, managing director of climate.us. It became fully active on Tuesday morning.
Last February, Ms. Lindsey was among the hundreds of NOAA workers laid off from the agency as Trump administration staffing cuts swept the federal government. Then, last June, climate.gov was effectively shuttered. The web address redirected to a different NOAA website and Ms. Lindsey said that some of the information was no longer accessible. “They hid the front door” to a trove of climate data and other resources used by researchers, teachers, and journalists, Ms. Lindsey said. “It was heartbreaking.”
At the time, the government had also taken down the website for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which housed the federal government’s national climate reports and other information about how the United States can adapt to climate change. And last July, the Department of Energy issued a report that downplayed the dangers of a warming world. (A judge later deemed the report unlawful.)
In a statement Tuesday morning, NOAA’s communications director, Kim Doster, said that “Research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov and its affiliate websites.”
Last summer, Ms. Lindsey, along with a small team of former NOAA staff members, crowdsourced roughly $280,000, she said, and began a tedious process of sifting through the archived site, recataloging and re-linking more than a thousand reports, data sets, articles and other resources.
Now, much of that information, including data and reports on climate-change-related disasters like hurricanes, wildfires and drought, is available to the public and free to use, Ms. Lindsey said. The new website includes status reports on key climate indicators, blog posts from scientists, maps, data and resources for educators. The site also includes access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a key government report focused on the risks posed by climate change.
Many government websites house data and research, but climate.gov was different, said Amanda Townley, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, an organization that advocates for science education in the United States. “It was literally the translation to the public,” she said. “It wasn’t just for scientists or researchers. It was for teachers. It was for the average person.”
The site was responsive to real-life events, often posting context in the midst of a cold snap or hurricane season, Ms. Townley said, and the team regularly took to social media to refute misinformation with scientific context. The site attracted more than a million visitors each month, said Ms. Lindsey, who was previously program manager and lead editor of climate.gov while working at NOAA
Ms. Lindsey said climate.us was aimed at the same audiences that had been served by the government site, and while the mission remains largely the same, she added that being removed from government oversight opens the door to broaden the project and include data and resources from other agencies outside of NOAA, including local and regional climate information. “The best solutions to our climate challenges are going to come from a climate literate public,” she said.
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