A climate website can look ordinary until the day it stops working. For nearly 15 years, NOAA’s Climate.gov served as a public doorway into climate science, translating technical research into readable articles, maps, charts, classroom materials, and practical explanations. When the Trump administration cut the federal employees and contractors responsible for producing that work in 2025, the site’s daily operations effectively ended, leaving a widely used public resource dormant and redirected.
The people behind the website did not accept that ending. Former Climate.gov team members regrouped, created an independent nonprofit project and launched Climate.us on June 23, 2026, restoring the collection outside federal control. Their new platform preserves the old site’s climate reporting and educational mission, while making clear that it is not operated, sponsored, or endorsed by the U.S. government.
A Trusted Public Resource Suddenly Went Quiet
Climate.gov was more than a warehouse of temperature records. It helped teachers explain El Niño, gave journalists context for extreme weather, guided planners toward climate data and allowed ordinary readers to understand why changes in oceans, ice, rainfall and heat mattered in daily life. NPR reported that the site had attracted nearly one million visitors per month in 2021, showing how heavily the public relied on its combination of official data, visual storytelling and plain-language explanation.
The disruption unfolded during the first half of 2025. NOAA terminated Climate.gov’s full-time federal and contractor staff, and by June the agency had redirected visitors to a broader NOAA climate page, saying future research products would be available through NOAA.gov and affiliated websites. The information had not all vanished from government servers, but former program director Rebecca Lindsey argued that it had become harder to locate, comparing the replacement to a renovated store whose front door opened into a closet.
That distinction matters because public access is not only about whether a file technically exists. Data scattered across agency pages can be difficult for a teacher, farmer, reporter or local official to find, interpret and use quickly. Climate.gov’s real value was its editorial layer: specialists organized the material, explained uncertainty, linked it to original research and presented it in forms that people without advanced scientific training could understand.
The Team Turned a Shutdown Into a Rescue Mission
Lindsey and two former colleagues began rebuilding the service in August 2025. Because NOAA climate data is public, the team could recover and republish much of the material, but recreating the website’s technical structure was not as simple as copying pages. The original custom search system was too expensive to reproduce, and the new group had to build fresh navigation, hosting, and review processes while operating with a far smaller budget.
Public support helped transform the rescue effort into a working platform. Climate.us says more than 2,500 small donors contributed about $250,000, representing roughly one-third of the funding behind the launch, while more than 80 scientists volunteered as subject-matter reviewers. The project also received a one-time anonymous grant, giving its core team additional time to develop the site and pursue longer-term nonprofit support.
The result is a substantial restoration rather than a perfect replica. Climate.us says it preserved the full content of Climate.gov as it existed before operations stopped in June 2025, including 15 years of news stories, expert blogs, climate indicator reports, maps, data pathways, literacy resources and classroom materials. It also restored access to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a major federal report examining climate impacts, risks and adaptation across the United States.
Climate.us Is Back, but the Work Is Not Finished
Visitors should not assume every page has been freshly updated. The team says the Global Climate Dashboard and several popular articles have received new data, but many other pages still reflect their June 2025 condition, and some material remains hidden pending restoration. The new site also lacks Climate.gov’s original custom-built search function, which means users may encounter gaps while the team improves how the archive can be explored.
Still, the project’s significance goes beyond recovering old webpages. Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said Climate.gov had been valuable because it connected global climate trends to people’s lives, while the independent replacement continues that bridge between raw scientific information and public understanding. Lindsey has stressed that the new platform will remain nonpartisan and focused on explaining what the evidence shows, not telling Americans which political choices to make.
“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Lindsey said at the launch. That sentence captures why Climate.us matters: a public resource built with taxpayer-funded science no longer depends entirely on the priorities of one administration. The Trump administration dismantled the team that kept Climate.gov alive, but the scientists, writers and designers behind it carried the work elsewhere, rebuilt the doorway and opened it again.
