There is a particular kind of bureaucratic hubris that believes you can simply switch off inconvenient facts, unplug fifteen years of carefully curated climate science, and then wander off whistling whilst the problem sorts itself out. The Trump administration, bless its cotton socks, gave this approach a thorough road test in 2025 — and discovered, as so many have before it, that climate data rescued online by determined scientists is rather harder to suppress than a strongly worded memo. The result is Climate.us, which is essentially Climate.gov wearing a new hat and a look of quiet, dignified defiance.
How Do You Delete Fifteen Years of Science? Carefully and Spitefully
The original Climate.gov was a perfectly sensible public resource run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — NOAA to its friends — providing climate information to governments, businesses, schools, and anyone who’d ever looked at a flooded street and thought “hm, that’s a bit much.” It had been cheerfully doing this for fifteen years. Then along came DOGE, the government efficiency outfit with all the surgical precision of a toddler with a lawnmower, and swept through the department in late February 2025.
Rebecca Lindsey, the site’s programme manager and lead editor, found herself out of a job almost immediately. One of the web developers followed shortly after. By May, political appointees had directed that the remaining editorial and data visualisation staff be removed from the contract entirely. Furthermore, before the final shutdown, the remaining team was ordered to scrub any content that violated Trump’s executive orders — including, extraordinarily, guides on teaching climate change to children. You read that correctly. Teaching children about weather: cancelled.
The site formally went dark in July 2025, redirected to a bland NOAA page that contains precisely none of the data it once housed. Meanwhile, scientists were left staring at a blank screen where fifteen years of their work used to be.
Climate Data Rescued Online: Scientists Do What Scientists Do
Here is where the story gets rather wonderful. Lindsey and her former colleagues, rather than quietly accepting their redundancy packages and taking up watercolour painting, decided to simply rebuild the whole thing. Consequently, Climate.us was born — an independent platform created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, staffed largely by the same people who built the original, and containing all the content that was purged from the .gov version, plus blogs, climate status reports, interactive maps, and national assessments of climate change.
“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Lindsey said, with the calm authority of someone who has spent a career explaining sea level rise to people who’d really rather not think about it. It is, when you think about it, a magnificently British response to a crisis — just get on with it, quietly, without making too much fuss, whilst absolutely refusing to be stopped.
The executive order that triggered all this declared itself in favour of “gold standard science” whilst simultaneously arguing that making fifteen years of climate data publicly available was somehow problematic. The order was particularly exercised about climate change models relying on worst-case scenarios. However, as University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs pointed out to The Guardian at the time, removing public access to the data doesn’t make the underlying climate any more cooperative. It just makes it harder for people to prepare for floods, droughts, and all the other thrilling meteorological entertainment a warming planet provides.
The Internet Remembers Everything, Even If Governments Wish It Wouldn’t
Lindsey told The Register that losing access to the expertise of federal scientists — with whom the team had partnered to verify accuracy — was a “real blow.” Nevertheless, she now believes the government is simply not the right long-term home for this kind of mission, which feels like a reasonable conclusion to reach after being sacked for running a climate website. The climate data rescued online at Climate.us is now fully accessible, scientifically rigorous, and sitting on a server that no executive order can touch — which is either deeply reassuring or deeply revealing about the state of American governance, depending on how optimistic you’re feeling today.
Read the original story at The Register – BOFH & Odd.
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