{"id":1599,"date":"2026-08-22T15:34:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T15:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1599"},"modified":"2026-08-22T15:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T15:34:50","slug":"fired-federal-employees-are-bringing-climate-change-info-back-to-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1599","title":{"rendered":"Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with <\/span><\/i>a donation<\/span><\/i>.<\/p>\n

Read more Shaken Baby Syndrome Has Been Largely Debunked. Courts Are Still Catching Up.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Since June 23, a group of former employees of the communications branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been busily resurrecting one of the government\u2019s premier educational websites on climate change.<\/p>\n

Climate.gov was started in the early 2010s by communicators with NOAA, and for more than a decade it consistently produced high-quality graphics and other charts documenting rising global temperatures, changing rain patterns, drought conditions, El Ni\u00f1o impacts, and other climate-related data. If you were a layperson and wanted to understand the parameters of human-induced global warming, the website rapidly became a go-to spot. By the 2020s, it was logging more than 1 million visitors per month, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a West Virginia-based communications specialist with an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a master\u2019s degree in journalism who used to work as the site\u2019s lead writer and editor.<\/p>\n

In February 2025, as the so-called \u201cDepartment of Government Efficiency\u201d (DOGE) purges accelerated, most of the staff and contractors attached to the website, Lindsey included, were fired \u2014 part of a NOAA culling that saw the agency\u2019s workforce cut by roughly 600 in the first couple months of the new administration. By May of last year, the website had been officially taken down. Try to access it today and you get redirected to a NOAA site with this Orwellian message: <\/p>\n

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In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (\u2018Restoring Gold Standard Science\u2019), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy\u2019s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (\u2018Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities\u2019), 15 USC \u00a7 2904 (\u201cNational Climate Program\u2019), 15 USC \u00a7 2934 (\u2018National Global Change Research Plan\u2019), and 33 USC \u00a7 893a (\u2018NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs\u2019), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov\/climate and its affiliate websites.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Calling it \u201cgold standard science\u201d is, of course, something of a stretch; peruse this site and you\u2019ll find no mention of human-induced global warming, no mention of CO2 emissions exacerbating climate change, no mention even that global warming is accelerating.<\/p>\n

Lindsey and her colleagues have, however, refused to go quietly into the night. They believe their educational mission was too important for them to simply fold in the face of Donald Trump and Elon Musk\u2019s hostility. \u201cWe worked very hard for 15 years to build Climate.gov, and had a relationship with our readers,\u201d Lindsey explained to Truthout<\/em>. \u201cAnd we wanted that to continue. We decided too much had been invested and too much was at stake to let it go without a fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year after Climate.gov\u2019s demise, Lindsey and several of her erstwhile colleagues resurrected the vast majority of its materials. Left out of the mix were only a few data sets, the information from which they are still trying to access, that were removed early in the DOGE purges because they ostensibly violated anti-DEI mandates or because they referred to the Gulf of Mexico despite Trump\u2019s executive order renaming it the Gulf of America. The new, privately run site is Climate.us and it contains a wealth of sophisticated data sets and graphics on the world\u2019s climate. Each week, new parts of the site come online\u2014 including, most recently, a blog titled the El Ni\u00f1o Southern Oscillation (ENSO), recreated just in time to help website visitors grapple with the likely consequences of what is shaping up to be the most powerful El Ni\u00f1o in decades.<\/p>\n

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Their work has proven to be an inspiration for ex-government employees in a number of other different agencies and branches of government. Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) communicators are, Lindsey says, now looking to resurrect climate-related EPA pages that have been taken down; a group called the Public Environmental Data Partners is attempting to rescue specialist environmental monitoring tools \u2014 it has some information online, but not yet a fully interactive website. Another group, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is working to save specialized environmental justice screening tools. As the Trump administration deliberately shreds decades of climate-related research, ex-government employees are attempting to ride to the rescue by creating a sort of shadow information-dispersal system. The American Geophysical Union, which most U.S. Earth scientists are members of, has been instrumental in putting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back on track after the Trump administration pulled support for its annual reports.<\/p>\n

Lindsey says that the Climate.us site now is seeing close to a million visitors a month, putting it up there with where the NOAA-run site was before its demise. Teachers use it frequently, she says, as do an array of others simply trying to get an accurate read on what is happening to the climate.<\/p>\n

As with the old government-run website, Climate.us has a network of scientific advisers around the country willing to lend their expertise to the project and to make sure that what the communications people write up is scientifically accurate. The network is made up of people such as Rick Thoman, a long-time National Weather Service employee in Alaska, who left the government in 2018 and moved over to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he is now a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness.<\/p>\n

Thoman used to work as an editor with the Arctic Report Card \u2014 another vital international project that the Trump administration has, scientists involved in it tell me, recently decided to withdraw from \u2014 and had provided Lindsey\u2019s Climate.gov team with detailed scientific input on Alaska-related phenomena. \u201cWhen, in February 2025, disaster occurred and Climate.gov goes away, and out of the ashes rises Climate.us, for me it was natural; I was happy to continue in the role in this new form,\u201d Thoman told Truthout<\/em>. \u201cBecause they are so skilled at turning complex environmental information into accessible graphics, the work they do is really important in conveying to non-specialists the changes that are happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

An Earth scientist who used to work for NASA (and who asked to remain anonymous) told Truthout <\/em>that he was now volunteering to be an external reviewer of Climate.us content \u201cbecause they\u2019re continuing an essential curated and recognized database of how the climate is changing \u2014 and where it\u2019s likely to go in the future.\u201d The scientist expressed dismay at the Trump administration\u2019s shuttering of critical climate change work that would be \u201cuseful to the U.S. military, to the states,\u201d and that ought to serve as background material upon which Congress based informed legislative decision-making around environmental policies. Now, he said, \u201cnot only are [members of the Trump administration] not making good decisions, but they don\u2019t want good information to be readily available.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Lindsey, the preservation of this vital climate-related information in an era of administration-enforced environmental ignorance has become a mission. \u201cClimate information shouldn\u2019t be available to the public just on a political basis or a whim,\u201d she said. Instead, there ought to be a way to \u201cpromote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Trump Administration Is Reviving a Visa Rule That Could Disrupt Higher Education<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientists are preserving vital climate-related information amid the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on climate science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nFired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People - Smart Moving Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1599\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People - Smart Moving Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Scientists are preserving vital climate-related information amid the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on climate science.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/smartmovinghome.com\/?p=1599\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Smart Moving Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-22T15:34:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/ec0d70042821fd684a174c8d0e8becfa\"},\"headline\":\"Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-22T15:34:50+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599\"},\"wordCount\":1263,\"commentCount\":0,\"articleSection\":[\"Interesting\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/smartmovinghome.com\\\/?p=1599\",\"name\":\"Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People - 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