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July 28, 2026
During its lifetime, Climate.gov was one of the internet’s most-visited climate information websites. As a federal agency science website hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Climate.gov provided nonpartisan, comprehensive information on climate science for the public. The site offered easily accessible articles, fact sheets, and in-depth climate reports—such as the Fifth National Climate Assessment—to inform the public on climate risks and opportunities.
In June 2025, the federal government shut down Climate.gov at the direction of the Trump Administration’s “Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science.” NOAA laid off the climate site’s entire content production staff and transitioned the previously-accessible content to an archived version embedded deep within NOAA’s general website. Users attempting to access Climate.gov are now redirected to NOAA’s climate landing page. This move has created new barriers to accessing widely-trusted climate science and data crucial to informing the public on how climate systems work.
Rebecca Lindsey served as the longstanding lead writer and editor of NOAA’s Climate.gov site. She is now the director and managing editor of Climate.us, a nonprofit, independent online guide to help visitors find answers to their climate questions. The endeavor is intended to fill the shoes of the former NOAA site by providing easy access to climate information that is safeguarded from political influence and encouraging climate literacy and action. Climate.us officially launched on June 23, 2026, and is now fully operational. Lindsey sat down with EESI to discuss her goals and vision for the future of the new project.
EESI: What was your experience with climate science before starting Climate.us?
Lindsey: Before Climate.us, I was the lead writer and editor for NOAA’s Climate.gov site for nearly 15 years. Before that, I was part of the team that built and ran the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Earth Observatory website for a decade. So my experience in communicating about climate science in ways that engage and inform the public is deep.
EESI: What was Climate.gov? What happened to it? How did different agencies contribute to the website? How did different stakeholders use it?
Lindsey: Climate.gov was among the most popular and respected federal climate sites on the web. When Facebook launched its Climate Science page in 2021 to combat misinformation, Climate.gov was one of only three sites they recommended as a trustworthy source to its tens of millions of users. At the start of 2025, if someone in the United States searched the word “climate,” Climate.gov was the top result. It served 15 million-plus visitors in 2024, and had more than half a million social media followers. Our reach was growing by more than 5% each year.
Climate.gov was a trusted source of free, timely, and plain-language information for teachers, journalists, broadcast meteorologists, farmers, insurance companies, and regular people with questions about climate. Our data visualizations and graphics were widely re-used in textbooks, news stories, and classroom resource collections. College professors teaching the next generation of climate scientists assigned our El Niño-Southern Oscillation blog as required reading for their courses.
EESI: When did the idea to launch Climate.us turn into reality? Who is involved in the project?
Lindsey: The idea turned into a reality in late summer last year. NOAA had fired or released from their contract the whole Climate.gov editorial team by May. By June, they had redirected the site’s home page to a NOAA.gov subpage, and on that page, they had removed all links back to the site’s content. I like to say it was as if a grocery store renovated its building so that the front door opened into a closet.
Other changes were happening at the federal level that summer. The Congressionally-mandated U.S. Global Change Research Program was being disbanded, and its website—with all of the National Climate Assessments—had been taken offline. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy was releasing reports challenging established climate science.
Many of us working to advance climate literacy felt that the nation urgently needed a durable, mature online platform where this information would be protected from politics. The fastest way we knew to do that was by rebooting Climate.gov as Climate.us. By July 2025, we were lining up a nonprofit sponsor and planning a crowdsourcing campaign, which we launched at the end of August.
Our effort has been the full-time work of myself and two former Climate.gov teammates: Anna Eshelman, our graphics and design lead, and Mary Lindsey, our Geographic Information System (GIS) and data visualization lead. We’ve also benefited greatly from a small group of volunteers.
EESI: What are your goals for this latest project? What climate data gaps will it help fill?
Lindsey: Our goal is to make sure that nonpartisan, trusted climate information remains easy to find and hard to erase. That is part of our larger mission, which is to educate, inform, and inspire people to engage in helping the country solve its natural and human-caused climate challenges. We want people to understand what those challenges are and to be able to have productive conversations to reach consensus and compromise. A better understanding of the science is not going to achieve that on its own, but it is part of what is needed.
EESI: What should federal policymakers know about Climate.us? How could they use it to make informed decisions?
Lindsey: We want policymakers and other stakeholders to know that we will continue to maintain our editorial policy of engaging with scientists as content reviewers and advisors. We have recruited a panel of more than 80 experts so far who have volunteered to review stories, recommend topics for us to cover, analyze data, and generally make sure that everything we publish is based on the best available science. We have no plans to engage in advocacy or partisan politics just because we are “outside the federal firewall.”
We want people like federal policymakers to know that when they see a meme online about volcanoes releasing more carbon dioxide than human activities, and they want to know the truth, they can come read our explainer on that, and see data-based answers. If they want to know what the polar vortex is, they can come to us. If their constituents are calling them in a panic about the possible impacts of “super” El Niño, they can come to us for non-sensationalist context on that. If they want to know how to find climate data for their state, we can point them to the most commonly-requested data. Our philosophy about climate communication has always been and will continue to be that we are not telling you what to think. We’re just telling you what science says is happening and what our choices, risks, and opportunities are.
EESI: What is your vision for a future state of climate science and data infrastructure? Where will Climate.us continue to make essential contributions to help realize that vision?
Lindsey: I think this is a really hard question to answer at this point in time. We are in a triage situation right now because for 20 years, the federal government believed it had a responsibility to inform the public about climate science, and invested in it. The public trusted federal climate science websites to inform and educate. Now many of those sites are gone, and we have to figure out how to replace them and how to fund their ongoing operations.
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I do think that the ease with which federal investment in climate science and in public engagement about that science was able to be discarded is all the evidence we need that there should be a different model for platforms like this. So, I can see Climate.us becoming the cornerstone of a more flexible climate literacy platform and ecosystem, with a more diverse network of supporters, stakeholders, and funders.
Hopefully, that will one day include federal funders again, but also maybe state and other governments, philanthropy, and other partners or sponsors. The core mission and editorial standards would remain independent and protected from federal politics, and be able to leverage that support when available, but not be solely dependent on it.
Authors: Megan Davies and Daniel Bresette
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