NFP Restores All The Content From Climate.gov That Trump Attempted To Disappear

from the nice-try-fascist dept

It’s no secret that Donald Trump has been waging an Orwellian war on knowledge and information for most of his second term thus far. While purging history of American racism, slavery, and anything else that makes us look less than perfect has been the primary focus in this war, so too has Trump attempted to simply disappear data and information around climate change from the public view. This attempt to make us all more ignorant about the harms and potential negative outcomes from climate change is, of course, completely insane and self-destructive. But if you’re an octogenarian suffering from a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder, what happens years after you’re going to be worm-food probably doesn’t concern you all that much.

Most recently, the Trump administration shut down climate.gov, a website that contained a wealth of information and research generated by government researchers and third-party scientists that worked at the request of government. Decades and decades of content and data, wiped away with the wave of a bruised hand by Trump.

Over decades, researchers in the US government and programs it sponsored built up a tremendous number of climate resources, from comprehensive analyses to massive datasets to basic explainers meant to inform the public. And people within the government built the climate.gov website to make it all accessible. But if you try to navigate there today, you get redirected to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and are greeted with the following message:

In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (“Restoring Gold Standard Science”), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June 23, 2025 Memorandum (“Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities”), 15 USC § 2904 (“National Climate Program”), 15 USC § 2934 (“National Global Change Research Plan”), and 33 USC § 893a (“NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science Education Programs”), 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.

This is, of course, nonsense. Or, to borrow a phrase, a litany of inconvenient truths that gave Trump indigestion and therefore had to be done away with. This was a repository of knowledge. It was a public good, making information on climate science available to anyone who sought it out. It didn’t cost a bunch of money. It contained work done by real scientists doing real science.

And, poof, it was gone.

Except many of the people who worked to build and maintain the site seem to have anticipated that this might happen. I don’t know how else to explain how they managed to not only maintain the full library of the site, but also spun up their own non-profit organization to host and maintain a nearly identical site on their own. And because this is material the government can’t copyright, it appears there is fuck-all the Trump administration can do about it.

While the government didn’t hesitate to delete inconvenient climate information, dedicated volunteers outside the government managed to preserve copies of much of the material, which the federal government is prohibited from copyrighting. The volunteers and former climate.gov admins got together and launched climate.us. On Tuesday, the team announced that it had completed the project to restore everything lost when climate.gov shut down.

The website features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources, classroom materials, and restored access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment.

If our own government is going to attempt to make us more stupid by trying to hide information, this is all of our jobs now. It may be a shame that it is the work of citizens to restore what our government is attempting to steal from us, but it is also a necessity. This is how you fight back against an authoritarian. It takes work. It takes effort. And it takes some money.

But this knowledge isn’t Trump’s property to erase. It belongs to all of us.

Filed Under: climate change, climate.gov, data, donald trump, transparency