Fired Scientists Revive the Climate Website Trump Shut Down
A small team of laid-off United States government scientists has rebuilt a climate information website that the Trump administration took offline last year, recruiting 80 volunteer researchers and re-linking more than a thousand reports and datasets.
“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Rebecca Lindsey, managing director of the website, climate.us, and former program director for the U.S. government website. climate.gov, said in a release.
Former employees of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revived climate science information—including reports and other documents—that had previously been posted on the government URL. The new site required tedious work to recatalogue information and make it accessible to the public once again, reports The New York Times.
“This information is too important,” Lindsey told U.S. National Public Radio (NPR). “It should remain in a protected place.”
According to the release, one-third of the funding backing climate.us was crowdsourced from about 2,500 small donations that amounted to about US$250,000. The effort also relied on volunteer work by more than 80 scientists acting as expert reviewers.
German government-funded newsroom Deutsche Welle writes that the website’s relaunch is part of “a wider fightback” to resist the Trump administration’s cuts to public science funding, while the website’s release says it “reflects strong public demand for reliable climate information.”
Climate.gov was shut down after the Trump administration laid off hundreds of NOAA employees, including Lindsey, as part of a larger push to slash the federal work force. The cuts have undermined public research into climate impacts, research that is essential for maintaining community health and well-being, Deutsche Welle says.
“They’re really helping people connect what’s happening at the global scale to how it matters to their lives,” Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told NPR.