Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.
Climate.gov, NOAA’s portal to the work of their Climate Program Office, will likely soon shut down as most of the staff charged with maintaining it were fired on 31 May, according to The Guardian. The site is funded through a large NOAA contract that also includes other programs. A NOAA manager told now-former employees of a directive “from above” demanding that the contract remove funding for the 10-person climate.gov team.
“It was a very deliberate, targeted attack,” Rebecca Lindsey, the former program manager for climate.gov, told The Guardian. Lindsey was fired in February as part of the government’s purge of probationary employees. She said that the fate of the website had been under debate for months, with political appointees arguing for its removal and career staffers defending it.
“We operated exactly how you would want an independent, non-partisan communications group to operate,” Lindsey said. “It does seem to be part of this sort of slow and quiet way of trying to keep science agencies from providing information to the American public about climate.”
Another former NOAA employee noted that the climate.gov purge spared two website developers. For some, this raised concerns that the climate.gov site might survive, but host anti-science content and misinformation under the guise of a once-trusted source of climate science.
This move comes amid a slew of other anti-science actions from the Trump Administration, including blocking EPA science funding, halting maintenance of key Arctic data, removing access to longstanding NOAA datasets, proposing to slash NASA’s Earth science funding, and pulling U.S. scientists out of domestic and international climate change reports.
“Hiding the impacts of climate change won’t stop it from happening,” said one former NOAA contractor, “it will just make us far less prepared when it does.”
—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer
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