Grass Roots
Government Scientists Fired by Trump Launch New Website for Sharing Climate Data
“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change.”
https://futurism.com/science-energy/government-scientists-noaa-trump-climate-data?fbclid=IwdGRjcASq5sRjbGNrBKrmtGV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHoaD4mCCpBkjjw7Pj1asBmdhr3PAi0ORScSzfMbXalVrhJKo-gWwTWpKs4K2_aem_eDKRrQ-Cl8x4UKLsZkJBug

Since September of 2024, federal science agencies in the US have axed nearly 120,000 employees, in a stinging loss for public research. Some of the heaviest impact was felt by scientists studying the climate, at bureaus like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Luckily for us, climate scientists are a resourceful bunch. A recent initiative pushed by former NOAA staffers has led to the creation of a non-profit website to share trusted climate data with the public.

Called climate.us, the new site is is built by former staffers behind climate.gov, the NOAA site which researchers, environmental journalists, and insurance underwriters alike have long trusted for accurate climate data — a public service eviscerated by the Trump administration.

The new site recently went “fully active” as a clone of climate.gov on Tuesday, managing director Rebecca Lindsey told the New York Times. It contains some 15 years of raw data on climate and weather, articles, illustrated reports, as well as access to government mandated climate assessments.

“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Lindsey said in a statement published on the new site. “Climate.us is building an independent, durable platform so people can continue to find the data and information they need to understand and talk about climate, and to teach, report, plan, prepare, and make informed decisions.”

The new initiative comes nearly a year after the Trump administration “hid the front door” to climate.gov, as Lindsey put it, by redirecting the web address to a different NOAA website after firing almost all the staff.

The idea of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere to combat climate change might be a necessary intervention, but it always sounded like a longshot.

Unfortunately, it seems like the strategy is already hitting a wall. A new report published this week found that ongoing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts are barely putting a dent in the fight against global warming — and that for them to start making an impact, they would need to be scaled up at a rate that rivals the adoption of solar panels.

In other words, we’re not doing it big enough, and we’re not doing it fast enough. And the longer we wait to get the ball rolling, the more carbon removal we’ll need to do to mitigate climate impacts.

“Countries have pledged around 2.7 billion [metric tons] of carbon removal by 2035 and about 3.6 billion by 2050, but climate pathways require much more, especially in the long term,” report coauthor William Lamb, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “This leaves a gap that grows significantly over time.”

Scientists generally agree that CDR efforts will play a small but necessary role in limiting global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — but only as a complement to the primary goal of aggressively reducing our emissions, and eventually hitting net zero emissions by 2050. The International Panel on Climate Change considers carbon removal to be “unavoidable,” or essential to achieving climate targets,