<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/29/nfp-restores-all-the-content-from-climate-gov-that-trump-attempted-to-disappear/>
"It’s no secret that Donald Trump has been waging an Orwellian war on knowledge
and information for most of his second term thus far. While purging history of
American racism, slavery, and anything else that makes us look less than
perfect has been the primary focus in this war, so too has Trump attempted to
simply disappear data and information around climate change from the public
view. This attempt to make us all more ignorant about the harms and potential
negative outcomes from climate change is, of course, completely insane and
self-destructive. But if you’re an octogenarian suffering from a textbook case
of narcissistic personality disorder, what happens years after you’re going to
be worm-food probably doesn’t concern you all that much.
Most recently, the Trump administration shut down climate.gov, a website that
contained a wealth of information and research generated by government
researchers and third-party scientists that worked at the request of
government. Decades and decades of content and data, wiped away with the wave
of a bruised hand by Trump.
Over decades, researchers in the US government and programs it sponsored
built up a tremendous number of climate resources, from comprehensive
analyses to massive datasets to basic explainers meant to inform the public.
And people within the government built the climate.gov website to make it
all accessible. But if you try to navigate there today, you get redirected
to the climate page of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
and are greeted with the following message:
In compliance with Executive Order 14303 (“Restoring Gold Standard
Science”), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s June
23, 2025 Memorandum (“Agency Guidance for Implementing Gold Standard Science
in the Conduct & Management of Scientific Activities”), 15 USC § 2904
(“National Climate Program”), 15 USC § 2934 (“National Global Change
Research Plan”), and 33 USC § 893a (“NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Science
Education Programs”), you have been redirected to NOAA.gov. Future research
products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at
NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.
This is, of course, nonsense. Or, to borrow a phrase, a litany of inconvenient
truths that gave Trump indigestion and therefore had to be done away with. This
was a repository of knowledge. It was a public good, making information on
climate science available to anyone who sought it out. It didn’t cost a bunch
of money. It contained work done by real scientists doing real science.
And, poof, it was gone.
Except many of the people who worked to build and maintain the site seem to
have anticipated that this might happen. I don’t know how else to explain how
they managed to not only maintain the full library of the site, but also spun
up their own non-profit organization to host and maintain a nearly identical
site on their own. And because this is material the government can’t copyright,
it appears there is fuck-all the Trump administration can do about it."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
