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.
She said one aim of the climate.us effort is to form a new, growing nonprofit organization that would in part keep building up climate.gov’s content, but at the new URL. This sets the group apart from other organizations that are more focused on simply preserving datasets.
“Climate.gov was never primarily about data, rescuing climate data or providing climate data,” Lindsey told CNN. “Climate.gov’s primary function was in interpretation, basically helping translate science to non-technical audiences and providing content that was attractive and that people would share and reuse.”
“Our primary focus is on these interpretive resources that the public has shown a great appetite for.”
Along those lines, another key goal for the group is to resurrect and host the entire website of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, rather than just the PDF version that is still available in a few places on the Internet.
The website was a key feature of the report and makes the information, released during the first Trump administration, far easier to access and navigate.
The climate.us group does plan to partner with other organizations to preserve key climate data and products, however, given that “the scale of what is being lost is enormous,” Lindsey said.
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