Federal employees who were axed during waves of cuts by the Trump administration have fought back against the dismantling of a key climate science website, Climate.gov, and put up a new site, Climate.us, that can now do everything the original did.
The site, with millions of users each year, was known for colorful charts that anyone could freely download and that simplified giant sets of data, such as temperature readings. Now it refers to another page and is no longer being updated.
Daniel Swain, a UC Agriculture & Natural Resources climate scientist, called the resources available at Climate.gov “the most efficacious dollars spent by NOAA on public-facing science, possibly ever.” He has used graphics from the former website on his popular weather blog.
“I am a terrible artist or illustrator. It would be very bad if I had to create those on my own.” Swain said. The website didn’t just make graphics that were beautiful, he said, they were accurate and reliable because of the network of researchers who fact-checked them.
Rebecca Lindsey was the editorial lead and program manager for Climate.gov until February 2025, when her position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationwas eliminated by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. She explained that the online resource was “a bridge between scientists, data and the public.”
Lindsey and her team have now rebuilt the bridge piece by piece, if just a bit further downstream.
The team is made of the same editorial and technical staff that ran Climate.gov. It’s paid for through a crowdfunding campaign and one large, anonymous donation.
The group has raised some $380,000, about $100,000 of which came in the last week. They also have recruited 80 scientists who are willing to volunteer as subject matter experts and fact checkers. It’s enough to keep the work going through February while they seek more long-term funding.
The first iteration of Climate.us went online in 2025 to keep the last 15 years of work from the government website available. The newest version restores the full function of the previous website.
For Californians, the timing could be important.
“We’re headed for a very strong El Niño event that will have significant implications for Southern California,” Swain said. “Climate.gov and the scientists behind it did a great job walking people through the last one, and I would expect that’s the case this time as well.”
Climate.gov excelled at tapping into a pool of academic experts to explain what was happening in nearly real time. This allowed the public to see how events such as wildfire, drought or large weather patterns such as El Niño were shaping their lives when they needed the information most. Research from academic institutions, by contrast, can take years to publish results from major natural disasters.
Swain emphasized that cuts to resources that give context to hard-to-interpret data is not just a loss for the research community.
“It’s getting more and more difficult for the American public to access the science and the scientists that their tax dollars have supported for over half a century,” he said.
With the revival of Climate.us, Swain said he plans to directly use the site and its graphics to keep Californians connected to the world of climate science.
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