The Trump administration killed Climate.gov. A new website is resurrecting it.
When I was reporting on climate change, one of the most useful websites in my daily rotation was Climate.gov.
The website from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), launched during President Obama’s first term, provided constant updates on the agency’s climate research in plain English, alongside vivid charts and graphics. It lasted 15 years, until the Trump administration gutted the site in 2025; the entire staff was disbanded through layoffs or unrenewed contracts, and the URL now redirects to NOAA’s website instead. Text on the site, dated June 24, 2025, says the redirect was done to comply with an executive order and White House policies, and that “future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”
Anyone who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s second term will recognize the shuttering of Climate.gov as one part of a larger project to obfuscate reality, particularly around science and climate change. Cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have created gaps in weather data. Over the summer, the Department of Energy deleted more than 1,600 pages about energy efficiency and utility bill savings amid brutal heatwaves that stressed power grids across the country — around the peak of a cyclospora outbreak that would have been caught sooner if not for cuts to the federal surveillance programs that usually track food-borne illnesses. If the federal government was once the sun around which most scientific research in this country orbited, it has now become a black hole.
There is, however, some light in the dark. In August 2025, a group of former Climate.gov staffers launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring back the Climate.gov archives and continue its work, under a new name: Climate.us. It was spearheaded by Rebecca Lindsey, the program manager and longtime editorial lead of Climate.gov, and raised $530,000 over six months through a combination of individual donors and grants from foundations. This year, Lindsey and her colleagues hope to raise an additional $300,000. The team incorporated as a nonprofit with fiscal sponsorship from Multiplier, a California-based nonprofit that focuses on environmental and social justice issues.
The new site, which launched in June, looks much like the old one, but with a few notable changes. The team is less than a third of its old size — three people rather than the 10 who ran the site at NOAA — and many of the links that used to redirect to other NOAA sites now redirect to resources hosted by Climate.us itself, likea copy of the Fifth National Climate assessment, which no longer exists at its original URL.
I spoke with Lindsey over Zoom about the origins of Climate.us, the challenges of picking up where the government left off, and her hopes for the future. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It was a 15-year effort that the government had made in trying to understand what the public wants to know about climate change, and then figuring out the best way to provide it to them. And so when everything started happening after the new administration took over in early 2025, it became clear that we were not going to be able to continue with business as usual as we had more or less done during the first Trump administration. We began getting instructions from NOAA [political appointees] to scour the site and find content that might be perceived to be in conflict with the executive orders on [DEI] and the Gulf of Mexico, and so that happened almost immediately. That was late January or early February.
Then NOAA experienced the loss of about 600 to 800 probationary employees as part of the DOGE-led purge, and myself and several of my colleagues also were fired. The remainder of the Climate.gov team were contractors, so their contract was still in place. They continued to keep the site running through the spring, but in May [2025] they found out that the contract was not going to be renewed and they were going to be removed too, so that was the entire team at that point. When I was fired in February, it was not clear that there was any sort of climate targeting because hundreds of other NOAA employees from all over the agency were also fired. But with the decision about the contract, it was obvious Climate.gov was being targeted, and they were not going to let the program operate anymore. All of us were devastated by that.
But also there were other decisions being made across the federal space with regard to climate information for the public. The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is the congressionally mandated group that is supposed to be providing climate information to the public, saw the entire office disbanded. Their whole website was taken down, including all five versions of the national climate assessments.
And then the Department of Energy convened this report about climate science and carbon dioxide, written by this very small number of people who are frequently cited for saying climate change is overblown. The report said things like warming is going to have some benefits and it’s not going to be that bad. And this is coming out from the Department of Energy, so it’s getting the prestige of the federal science apparatus behind it, and then the EPA used that report as justification for rolling back their previous finding that carbon dioxide did meet the definition of a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. [Editor’s note: While the EPA cited the report when it announced its intention to rescind the endangerment finding, the report was not cited in the final rule.]
It was this chain of events where they were taking away public access to authoritative climate information, then replacing it with contested science information that wasn’t peer-reviewed, and then using that bad information to make policy recommendations and decisions.
That sequence of events was what really alarmed us. We felt like there was more going on than just people losing their jobs, and that this was not a one-off. [It seemed more like] this was a situation that went beyond policy disagreements across the partisan spectrum, but rather a more deliberate attempt to potentially use Climate.gov to spread misinformation.
We felt very strongly that there needed to be a mature, robust, ready-to-go online space with trustworthy climate information. We have experience as a team producing content that is public-friendly and accessible and shared by the media and put into textbooks. We felt the fastest way to get something like that up and going would be to just clone Climate.gov and stand it back up in the nonprofit space.
By the end of July [2025], maybe early August, we had made the decision to launch a crowdfunding campaign to try and get enough money to hire web developers on a contract. Of the three of us who are doing this full time — it’s myself; our maps and data lead, Mary Lindsey, who is my sister; and Anna Eshelman, who is our graphic design lead — none of us were web experts, so we knew we were going to have to hire someone to do the web part of it and actually build the new website.
We are still using the crowdfunding money to pay for web developers and other sorts of support. But we’re all new to the nonprofit space. I was a federal contractor for all of my professional career, first at NASA and then at NOAA, so I joke that my experience with fundraising is that every year I’d go to my boss and say, “This is what I need to do the things you’ve asked me to do.” I’m still learning a lot about foundations and how people in the nonprofit space get funding.
The challenge with something like Climate.us is that it’s not just a website; it’s a program. The news and features section needs experienced science writers, and the maps and data section needs experienced data visualizers, and so on. We’ve had people volunteer all sorts of expertise and skills, but we still need a core team, and I’m finding it much more challenging to get the kinds of money and multi-year commitments that you need to be able to offer someone a job. So it’s just very challenging. Within a few months, we’re going to be right back where we were when we started.
When the editorial lead also has to be doing the fundraising, it’s very difficult to restart our editorial process with any sort of reliability. I’m trying to fit writing and editorial stuff into the cracks between meetings with donors, going to conferences, reading about foundations and the kind of work that they fund, and so on.
I feel a lot of pressure because everybody was so wonderfully appreciative of the rollout when we launched the site. We got so much attention, and it generated another big pulse of crowdfunding donations. But I’m feeling like if we can’t quickly leverage [that support], if we can’t start doing stories and producing content to satisfy that that interest and demand, then we’re going to lose this opportunity to reassure the public that we are still the same source for relevant, timely climate information that they recognized and trusted us for at Climate.gov. So right now there’s a lot of pressure on us to try to figure out how to give people what we gave them before with a third of the staff.
Right now, [our target audience for Climate.us] is the science-interested public, which includes journalists and other people who are communicating with the public themselves. We’re basically going back to our origins and saying, first can we just get funding to reboot the news and features team? And if we’re successful there, then maybe we can leverage that to get funding to fully reboot the teaching climate section.
We are not focusing as much right now on decision-makers, in part because that audience was served by what we call our sister site, the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit, and that program still exists at NOAA.
Climate.gov averaged more than a million visits a month at the start of 2025. We saw about that much in the month after we launched Climate.us, but our ability to match or improve on that in coming months is going to depend on our ability to resume content production that will make the site timely and relevant to current public interest and demand.
It took 15 years to build Climate.gov into what it was. As a country, we don’t have 15 years. There are things that need to happen right now with respect to climate change and what we’re going to do about it. I feel a lot of impatience. Was [Climate.gov] perfect? Is it everything we need in the realm of climate communication? No, but it’s the cornerstone that we could build on more rapidly.
But now that the site is live, we have to focus on getting back to making the product — the plain-language explainers; the expert blogs; the shareworthy maps and graphics — that built our brand at Climate.gov, and which we know audiences want. Once we have a regular stream of new content, we can think again about marketing and branding.
The content was the easy part, but rebuilding our search module, which had been built by a research group in Europe and linked to multiple government sites, was the challenging part, because we had to rebuild it so it only focused on results from our site.
People are sometimes surprised when I talk about this, but for the most part climate data have not disappeared. NOAA is still collecting climate data and producing monthly climate summaries. Ocean heat content data are still coming in and being processed and stored on servers and made available. So all of that still exists, and we still point to it. Our pathways, for the most part, are still operational and intact.
Now, of course, that could change at any moment. If the president’s proposed budgets go into effect, that would certainly change things; there are proposals to completely get rid of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and at that point big changes to actual data might begin to happen. But so far, Congress has not bought into those budgets.
We are considering, however, expanding and adding international sources of data. There are five or six research organizations all over the world that have a global temperature data set. In the U.S. there’s NOAA and NASA, and a new one, the Berkeley Surface Temperature Record. But Japan’s meteorological agency has their own, and the Copernicus Climate Change Institute in Europehave their own, so we have been thinking about expanding our recommended assets beyond just U.S.-based ones, so that if the worst did happen, if those data sets were actually compromised or stopped being supported, the public would know that there are other options. Climate research still is going on and being supported and talked about in other parts of the world.
We have two editorial modes: One is our experienced science writers work with the data, come up with stories, and pull in a subject matter expert to act as an advisor and to review the content. But our other mode is that we take a supporting role and let the scientists do the writing and the communicating, and we provide the polish on top. So we provide editorial support and help them build graphics and things like that. So that is a very powerful way to let the public in on the process of science and how scientists think.
Emily is volunteering her time. We were able to pay her when she contributed to Climate.gov, but we can’t do that here yet. But she feels that she can contribute to a blog, and even though we have not been able to fund her yet, we are still going to provide the graphic and editorial support. We’re going to keep recruiting and trying to find other bloggers from academia, from international people to other ENSO experts to contribute to try to help us get back up to the level of productivity that we had before.
In the absence of clear, robust evidence that agencies like NOAA or NASA could protect a site like Climate.gov, I personally think it’s too vulnerable. I think the better model would be if we could build a robust version of Climate.us that remains in the nonprofit sector but is able to flexibly partner and accept funding from the federal government. I think that would be the ideal situation.
At the same time, I am pragmatic, and what’s most important is that the work continues. If in a few years we find ourselves in a climate-friendly administration, and they are pushing very hard to reboot Climate.gov in some fashion in the federal space, and I find myself in a situation where I’m no longer able to get philanthropic funding because [funders feel the government can foot the bill], what I want to have done with Climate.us in these years is make sure that’s still possible.
So we’re not going to be changing our scope or our editorial approach. We are still going to be using authoritative science and getting subject matter expert review of our content. We are not going to get involved in advocacy for particular climate policies, or weigh in on different solutions. We want to stick to the science of climate, and we may begin to do more stories on the science of mitigation, like for example looking at the science basis for the idea that we might be able to cool the Earth by solar geoengineering.
But I just want to make sure that if we are in a situation in a few years where philanthropy is no longer as motivated because now the government is more climate-friendly, we could give back what we have done in this period, and it would still be appropriate and suitable for a government site about climate. I don’t know. That may be naive.