(AFP) – First came orders to scrub references to how climate change disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Then demands to erase mentions of the “Gulf of Mexico.” By early summer, the climate.gov front page no longer existed. The federal portal once billed as a “one-stop shop” for the public to understand global warming had become another casualty of President Donald Trump’s war on science.
Now, a group of former employees is working to bring it back to life. Helping coordinate the effort is Rebecca Lindsey, the site’s former managing editor, who was fired in February along with hundreds of others at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “We all began to just brainstorm about how we could keep and protect climate.gov,” she told AFP. The team’s new website, climate.us, went online a few days ago, promising — according to its landing page — to “build an enduring, independent, and scientifically rigorous platform that the world can rely on.”
The core group includes a handful of people from the former climate.gov team — which once included science writers, scientists, and data visualizers — plus “half a dozen” other volunteers supporting the effort under cover of anonymity for fear of retaliation. They have two goals. First: to republish the taxpayer-funded trove of material that was taken down — including the legally mandated National Climate Assessments, bedrock scientific studies produced every four years, but paused under Trump’s second term.
The second, more ambitious goal — which hinges on securing enough funding — is to rebuild the resources and technical tools that made climate.gov, first launched in 2012 under former president Barack Obama, so indispensable, according to users. These ranged from interactive dashboards tracking sea-level rise, Arctic ice loss and global temperatures, to plain-language explainers on phenomena like the polar vortex, to a blog dedicated to the El Nino Southern Oscillation, the planet’s most influential natural climate driver. In 2024 alone, climate.gov drew some 15 million page views.
“We’ve been having meetings through the summer that culminated in us writing a prospectus we hope to shop to major philanthropies and funders,” Lindsey said. A crowdfunding campaign has also begun to drum up support. As of Thursday, their donorbox.org page showed $50,000 raised toward a $500,000 goal. But for Lindsey, what matters more than the sum is the show of interest.
If all goes well, she said, the project could become “an anchor for lots of groups at other federal science agencies where they have content or data that have gone silent or been taken down. We definitely hope we could be a lifeboat for them as well.” The team has already been buoyed by an outpouring of goodwill, from scientists to schoolteachers offering their time. “This is a problem we can try to solve,” Lindsey said. “Even if it’s a small thing in the big picture, just knowing that someone is doing something is encouraging to people.”
– Issam AHMED
© 2024 AFP
