science

Remove something from the internet? You can't stop the (climate change) signal, Mal

It's back! After Donald Trump shuttered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate.gov website in 2025, cutting off public access to its 15-year archive of climate information, former members of the site's team have brought much of it back at a new domain.

“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release.

Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025. 

“In May, political appointees directed that all the remaining Climate.gov editorial and GIS/data visualization staff be removed from the contract,” Lindsey added. 

Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to “keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it.” 

Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing “gold standard science.” The order decried what it called the prior administration’s politicization of science by, among other things, “encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.” 

The EO called out climate change science as a particular area of concern, arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change. 

The shuttering of climate.gov followed a day after the order, leading to scientists expressing concern about the ability of governments, the public, and private organizations to combat the effects of a changing climate, whether the Trump administration believed the data was true or not. 

“This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts,” University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs told The Guardian in July 2025, following closure of the site and removal of other climate information from public repositories. 

Changes to the site actually began before that, Lindsey told us. Prior to her termination, the Climate.gov team was ordered to search its archives and remove any information that violated Trump’s Gulf of America order and ban on DEI programs. Guides on teaching climate change and principles of climate literacy were among documents purged from the site in that sweep. 

Climate.us, and Climate.gov before it, are designed to be a bridge between scientists studying the climate and the public, Lindsey told us.

“Most of those functions we can perform almost as well outside of the federal domain as in it,” Lindsey said. “However, losing access to the tremendous store of knowledge and expertise possessed by federal scientists, with whom we partnered to make sure our content was accurate, is a real blow.” 

All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. 

Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn’t the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change. 

“I believe that fostering climate literacy is a public good, one of those things that benefit society as a whole, rather than one company or person,” the Climate.us director told us. “So I would definitely have concerns that going back to the government would just put us on a hamster wheel, where we’d face the same situation the next politics shift.” 

Regardless of whether that offer comes, Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that’s understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond. 

“We aren’t trying to tell people what to do about climate change,” Lindsey said. “We just think that people will come up with better strategies to confronting the world’s climate challenges if they understand what the science is telling us.” ®