Fired NOAA scientists rebuild Trump-axed Climate.gov as nonprofit Climate.us

A small team of former NOAA staff has relaunched the federal government’s shuttered Climate.gov as an independent nonprofit site, Climate.us, which went live on June 23. The effort is led by Rebecca Lindsey, the site’s former program manager, alongside data-visualization specialist Mary Lindsey and staff artist Anna Eshelman. The project is a direct response to the Trump administration’s decision to redirect the Climate.gov domain and lay off the team behind it, which effectively pulled 15 years of public-facing climate maps, educational material, and indicator reports offline.

The rebuilt site preserves resources that were at risk of vanishing entirely, most notably the Fifth National Climate Assessment — the government’s most comprehensive analysis of climate change — which had been deleted from federal servers. To keep the resurrected material credible without government backing, the group recruited roughly 80 scientists to a volunteer science panel that fact-checks published content. Funding has come from crowdfunding and individual donors, raising more than $400,000 since launch.

The case is a notable example of civic data-preservation stepping in when government-hosted public records are removed for political reasons. It underscores how fragile centrally-hosted public data can be, and how quickly domain control and staffing decisions can erase institutional knowledge — while also demonstrating that motivated former insiders can reconstitute that data outside government control, at least when donor money and expert volunteers are available.