JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - The Trump administration laid off the scientists who ran the government's climate website, then shut the site down. So the scientists rebuilt it themselves, with their own money, & put it back online.

The Other 98%
June 28 at 10:59AM
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The Trump administration laid off the scientists who ran the government's climate website, then shut the site down. So the scientists rebuilt it themselves, with their own money, and put it back online this week.
As reported by NPR, the site is called Climate. us, and it launched this week to replace Climate.gov, the trusted government source that nearly a million people visited every month for clear, official data on a warming country.
Last year, the administration's Department of Government Efficiency laid off the entire team that ran it. Then, under an executive order, the government took the site down. Visitors now hit a page saying the data has moved to NOAA.gov, where, in practice, it is buried and nearly impossible to find.
Rebecca Lindsey ran Climate.gov for years before DOGE cut her job. She put it plainly: NOAA "renovated a store, and they had the front door open into a closet." So in August she and two other laid-off colleagues started rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
They crowdsourced about $280,000 to cover the technical work. They recruited roughly 80 volunteer scientists to fact-check everything the site publishes. An anonymous donor gave a one-time grant to keep it running into next year.
Because the underlying data is public, they were able to download it and rebuild the dashboards, the 15-year archive of climate stories, the maps, the classroom materials, all of it. The hardest part, Lindsey said, was rebuilding the search function the government had made too expensive to keep.
A climate scientist at Texas Tech who used to send people to the old site said the new one closes the gap. A data-preservation expert called it "a success story" born from the brain drain the administration created, all that expertise now sitting outside a government that didn't want it.
Lindsey says the team is debating whether to hand the site back to a future administration or keep it independent for good. She is leaning toward keeping it out of reach.
"The fact that they got rid of it so easily is proof that we shouldn't make it vulnerable again."
They fired the messengers. The messengers bought a new megaphone and went back to work.

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