#climate.gov

Eric Holthaus at The Guardian:

A major US government website supporting public education on climate science looks likely to be shuttered after almost all of its staff were fired, the Guardian has learned. Climate.gov, the gateway website for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa)’s Climate Program Office, will imminently no longer publish new content, according to multiple former staff responsible for the site’s content whose contracts were recently terminated. “The entire content production staff at climate.gov (including me) were let go from our government contract on 31 May,” said a former government contractor who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “We were told that our positions within the contract were being eliminated.” Rebecca Lindsey, the website’s former program manager, who was fired in February as part of the government’s purge of probationary employees, described a months-long situation within Noaa where political appointees and career staff argued over the fate of the website.

“I had gotten a stellar performance review, gotten a bonus, gotten a raise. I was performing very well. And then I was part of that group who got the form letter saying, ‘Your knowledge, skills, and abilities are no longer of use to Noaa’ – or something to that effect.” Lindsey said she had been worried that climate.gov might be a target of the new administration soon after the election, but when a large Noaa contract was up for renewal at the end of May, her former boss told her that a demand came “from above” to rewrite parts of the contract to remove the team’s funding. “It was a very deliberate, targeted attack,” said Lindsey. Lindsey said the content for climate.gov was created and maintained by a contracted staff of about 10, with additional contributions from Noaa scientists, and its editorial content was specifically designed to be politically neutral, and faithful to the current state of the sciences. All of those staff have now been dismissed, she said.

[...] The climate.gov site was housed within the communication, education, and engagement division of Noaa, which describes itself as “the largest team in the federal government dedicated to climate communication, education, and engagement”.

The website receives hundreds of thousands of visits per month and is one of the most popular sources of information about climate science on the internet. The fired staff believe the changes to climate.gov were targeted by political appointees within the Trump administration and specifically aimed at restricting public-facing climate information.

The new website will be climate.us. I just visited the site, and it is up and running, for now as an introduction and asking for seed money. Here's the one-minute video from the site:

Excerpt from this CNN story:

A small group of about 10 writers, researchers and web development ninjas are launching an ambitious effort to preserve key climate data that the Trump administration has taken offline, including a landmark, congressionally mandated report and the contents of the climate.gov website.

The data, writings and reports will be hosted at climate.us, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former project manager for climate.gov, and will focus on information that is readily understandable by the public.

Lindsey was fired last winter along with other probationary employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while other climate.gov contributors’ contracts were canceled.

Climate.gov now redirects users to a different NOAA website controlled by political appointees, Lindsey said. The library of information the public used to have access to, on everything from El Niño to rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, is no longer available.

“This information is valuable,” Lindsey said of climate.gov. “Our team is valuable. We’ve been working together for more than a decade. We have deep experience serving the public with information and explaining climate and climate change, and the government has already made a huge investment in this content. It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd to think that they’re going to just take it all down and hide it away.”

The new push to save climate.gov and the climate assessment’s website involves the initial help of the nonprofit organization Multiplier, which also helps provide support for the data rescuing group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, Lindsey said.

Those involved in the climate.us project are also seeking seed funding and planning a crowdfunding campaign to save other climate information that is going dark or being modified with misinformation by the Trump administration, Lindsey said. For example, earlier this month the Department of Energy released a report written by five climate contrarians that attempted to poke holes in widely accepted climate science findings and argued the problem isn’t nearly as significant as mainstream climate research shows.

Climate.us has now restored everything taken down by the government.

US’s climate.gov site, taken down by Trump, relaunched by nonprofit

Well, well, well – here we go again. Do ya, people of America, wanna live in a country that appears to be back on track to start seeing ever more increased levels of pollution in America – AND ‘possibly‘ moving from geometric increases in pollution to exponential increases…? Do ya wanna live in a country where we no longer can obtain data from some brilliant people, experts and scientists who…

"This is an unusual time of year to see an increased fire weather risk across the Northeast. Red Flag Warnings issued across this area of the country generally peak in March through May. Below-normal precipitation has been a main culprit in keeping conditions dry.

Climate literacy principle #4: As of 2021, Earth had warmed by about 1.1°C above preindustrial levels. The current rate of warming is roughly 30x faster than the rate at which Earth warmed as it emerged from the last ice age.

"From the perspective of fairness, the United States has released more heat-trapping gases to date than either China or India, the world’s two most populous countries. Carbon dioxide is a long-lived greenhouse gas that can linger in Earth’s atmosphere for thousands of years. Consequently, the United States bears more responsibility for the amount of warming that has occurred so far and will persist for millennia. Yes, it matters. " NOAA Climate.Gov