Climate.gov Destroyed, Open Data Saves It — Former NOAA Team Rebuilds as Climate.us

After the Trump administration gutted NOAA and took Climate.gov offline, three former employees preserved 15 years of irreplaceable climate data by launching an independent, donation-funded nonprofit.

When the Trump administration slashed NOAA's funding earlier this year, one of its most vital public resources went dark. Climate.gov — the go-to hub for climate data, educational materials, maps, and the Fifth National Climate Assessment — was taken offline overnight. Fifteen years of carefully curated climate science suddenly had no home.

Three former NOAA employees refused to let it vanish. Rebecca Lindsey, her sister Mary Lindsey, and colleague Anna Eshelman became the core team behind Climate.us, an independent nonprofit that launched its full platform this week. The site preserves the complete Climate.gov archive: interactive dashboards tracking Arctic sea ice, atmospheric carbon, and global temperatures; classroom resources for teaching climate and energy; NOAA's oral history archives from communities affected by climate change; and the now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment.

The project is funded the way public infrastructure should be — by the public. Over 2,500 small donations totaling roughly $250,000 covered one-third of the launch costs. More than 80 scientists volunteered as subject matter expert reviewers.

"Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," said Rebecca Lindsey, now Climate.us's Managing Director. The site carries the tagline: independent, nonprofit, and immune to politics.

The rescue was legally possible because U.S. government data is public domain by law. Had the datasets been proprietary, the administration's cuts would have erased them permanently. Instead, they found a permanent home.

Climate.us is live now. It runs on donations.

Sources: Ben Werdmuller — Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it. | Climate.us launch announcement