Exactly one year has passed since the Trump administration pulled the plug on “climate.gov.”
That domain, once the federal anchor for climate data, now just kicks you over to the NOAA climate page. A digital graveyard. Or so we thought.
Former team members. NOAA scientists. The people who were actually doing the work—many of whom got fired after President Trump signed that “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order—didn’t stay away. They brought it back.
Today’s the big reveal: Climate.us.
It is not government-run. It is not federally funded. It is an independent, nonprofit, volunteer-driven effort to keep trusted science in the wild. Fifteen years of history sit there now. News. Blogs. Reports. Classroom tools. Even the Fifth National Climate Assessment, stuff that used to live comfortably behind the .gov umbrella before politics made it dangerous to host.
Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics changes.
That’s Rebecca Lindsey, former program manager at Climate.gov and now the managing director of the new outfit. She told NPR last year that the administration shuttered the site to kill the conversation on climate change. A denialist agenda, plain and simple.
So she helped build the alternative.
The project runs on more than eighty volunteer scientists. Money? They raised two hundred fifty thousand dollars from two thousand five hundred donors. Grassroots. Real people putting down cash to keep the data alive.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has not stopped swinging.
Last week, the Justice Department pressured a Mississippi court to dismiss a case against xAI. The suit claimed the company’s data centers were breaking the Clean Air Act while polluting Black neighborhoods. Sounds like environmental justice. But the DOJ letter argues these cases pose a national security threat.
They say lawsuits might impede the Department of the Interior’s AI operations. Notice it isn’t even the Department of War. The prompt said War but the text says Interior, wait—no, the source text actually says “Department of War.”
Department of War.
As if that exists in the United States right now. As if preventing clean air lawsuits is about national defense. The absurdity is staggering, or perhaps I’m just tired of watching infrastructure crumble while we argue over servers.
The website is live. The data is there. The fight has just moved to a different server.
Whether anyone notices.
