Introduction
When Rebecca Lindsey was fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in February, the first thing she did was worry about what would happen to the website she and her team had built over the past decade and a half. Lindsey had been the lead writer and editor, and more recently the program manager, of Climate.gov, a site that distilled the agency’s research on climate change into easy-to-understand, free resources for the public.
Threat to Climate Information
She was right to be concerned: within a matter of months, the Trump administration had eliminated the rest of the staff supporting Climate.gov and shut down the website — ironically, to comply with an executive order calling for “restoring gold standard science”.
Response from the Scientific Community
Members of the former Climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: Climate.us.
Goals of Climate.us
The intent behind Climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the Climate.gov website when it died, but to continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features, and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists.
Challenges and Opportunities
Since its launch two weeks ago, the new site has gotten about 800,000 page views — an impressive number, considering that the old NOAA site had been getting about a million views a month, according to Lindsey.
Conclusion
These efforts to save climate information are crucial, experts said, but it’s tough for a patchwork of nonprofits, universities, and independent initiatives to fill the vacuum left by the federal government removing the most accessible resources about climate change.
Source / Reference: https://grist.org/solutions/scientists-saving-climate-information-government-websites/