Science is being attacked in so many ways. Today, we're going off the radar to give science a voice. Climate change is happening and it's going to continue to happen whether or not they try to hide that information. We'll learn what was lost when climate.gov of disappeared and how a group of fired Noah employees are fighting back to return that vital information to the public
WATCH: Climate Blackout: Censoring Science, Endangering LivesTranscripts here for readers writers and researchersIn May of 2025, the United States government did something unprecedented.
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They took down climate.gov, a website that Americans relied on for vital climate information, information
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we'd already paid for with our tax dollars. It compiled decades of research that warned people of impending climate
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hazards in their region and how to prepare so they could keep their families safe when disaster strikes.
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It's a pattern we've seen before. From pesticides, lead pollution, tobacco to
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even nuclear fallout, America has a disturbing history of silencing science.
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Science is being attacked in so many ways. Today, we're going off the radar
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to give science a voice. Climate change is happening and it's going to continue to happen whether or not they try to
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hide that information. We'll learn what was lost when climate.gov of disappeared and how a group of fired Noah employees
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are fighting back to return that vital information to the public. Our children,
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our grandchildren, they're going to inherit the climate that we're giving them now. We can't be simultaneously
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handing them a problem and then hiding the information that they need to try to figure out what they're going to do.
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I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie and you're listening to Off the Radar, a production of the National Weather Desk.
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On the show, we dig deep into topics about weather, climate, the ocean, space, and much more. Our goal is to
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help you better understand the weather and to love it as much as we do.
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In 1921, workers at a GM lab were attempting to fix a problem. Automobile
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engines that were fed common low-grade fuel would vibrate excessively, causing structural damage to the machinery. A
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chemist tried pouring a small amount of tetraylled into the engine. And like magic, the wild engine was tamed. They
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found a way to turn cheap, low-grade fuel into something more efficient for automobiles. A new phenomenon was born.
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Leaded gasoline. But the human cost was immediate and catastrophic.
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By 1924, lead poisoning was killing workers. At one New Jersey plant, five
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died and 35 suffered neurological damage out of just 49 employees. Standard Oil
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even institutionalized workers like Joseph Leslie to hide the violent insanity caused by lead exposure,
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telling his family that he had died. Despite mounting evidence, including a 1943 study showing learning disabilities
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were universal in lead poisoned children, the industry suppressed the truth.
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By 1965, Americans carried 100 times more lead than their pre-industrial
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ancestors. Studies linked lead exposure to lower IQs and higher crime rates.
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Decades of bipartisan silence followed. It wasn't until public outrage grew in
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the 1970s that either party acted decisively. Even then, leaded gasoline
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wasn't fully banned until 1996. That's 75 years after we knew it was
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killing us. 75 years of toxins in our air going into the lungs of children. 75
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years of scientific evidence that this substance was unsafe for our government to take action.
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Does this narrative sound familiar? Well, it should because it's happening again.
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Our atmosphere is warming at an alarming rate. That's happening because we're burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and
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gas, which release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that trap heat in Earth's atmosphere. This is not new
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information. The scientific principle was known by the mid 19th century. The
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first modern evidence appeared in 1938, but the US federal government officially
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recognized the danger in 1965, two decades before climate change entered mainstream politics. For years, Noah
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published vital climate data on sites like climate.gov, a website dedicated to tracking and explaining the effects of
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climate change. But in May of 2025, the government slashed Noah's funding, fired
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hundreds of employees, and took down these websites, censoring potentially life-saving climate information.
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Just like with lead poisoning, we're prioritizing short-term profits over long-term public health. The pattern is
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clear. Suppress the science, protect the profits, let future generations pay the
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price. I'm a certified digital meteorologist.
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I'm a science communicator. And I'm a mother. I've worked in broadcasting, academia, and nonprofit.
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I'm also a self-proclaimed people pleaser. In fact, in my first job in TV, my nickname was Switzerland because I
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was the neutral voice of the weather department, keeping the peace with two very opinionated meteorologists that I
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worked with. But it's my job to share correct information with you, to take
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scientific information and translate it into something that's understandable and relatable to the general public. That's
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the whole point of this podcast, and that's what I'm going to do today. I'm going off the radar with Rebecca
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Lindsay, former lead editor, writer, and program manager of climate.gov.
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Rebecca and a group of other fired Noah employees refuse to leave Americans in the dark. They're harnessing their
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talents, their knowledge, and creating a space where educators, journalists, and
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concerned citizens can have access to the information they deserve. information that will help future
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generations survive and thrive in the world we are leaving them.
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Hi Rebecca, welcome to Off the Radar. Can you start by telling me what climate.gov was?
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Climate.gov was a publicfriendly source of science-based information about climate including natural climate
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variability and human caused climate change. Um, we provided magazine style features and explainers, attractive
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reusable maps and other graphics, classroom resources for educators, and
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easy access to popular climate tools and data sets. We were um run uh operated
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out of the climate program office in um Noah's uh office of oceanic research um
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the Noah research uh line office. We had been online since around 2010. We had
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about 600,000 followers on social media and we had more than 15 million page
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views a year. And what did the team look like? Like who was on the team and what did you do
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for about 13 years? I was the managing editor as a federal contractor and then
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uh I also became the the climate.gov program manager in late 2023. So I had
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been a civil servant for a year and a few months when I was fired in February
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along with hundreds of other Noah probationary employees. Our editorial team, content production team consisted
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of um data visualizers, um science writers, an artist, um meteorologists,
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and we had contributors for things like our very popular ENSO blog and polar
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vortex blog. We had scientists who partnered with us. They wrote the posts
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and we provided editorial polish and also um data visualization support. Um
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yes and so blog is very popular. Um okay. So tell me about what did happen in February and and h the changes that
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took place there. Very early in the Trump administration. We were ordered to remove any content
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that was related to the importance of diversity and inclusion in climate science and services. Anything related
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to the idea of climate equity, which is making sure climate policy is fair, especially to communities that have been
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historically excluded from public decision-m, public policy investment.
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That directive forced us to remove two very important resources from our
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teaching climate section. one was the 2024 update to the climate literacy guide which was uh produced by the USGCP
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um and as well as our entire collection of classroom resources for educators
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because it's a database and there were some resources that were related to diversity, inclusion, climate equity,
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and we couldn't just selectively turn off certain resources. So, we had to take the whole collection offline. So
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that was the first change um that that happened. And then I was fired in
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February. The team um the rest of the team who were um full and part-time
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contractors continued to work for a few months. But then in May, we got word
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that all of the climate.gov content team was going to be removed from the
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contract that was up for renewal. And so the rest of the team was let go at the
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end of May. The final attack was that in June um political appointees at Noah
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ordered the web operations team to essentially hide the climate.gov homepage by setting up a permanent
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redirect from the climate.gov homepage to noah.gov/climate.
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Um which the Noah site is under more direct control of political employees.
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Climate.gov gov was based in one of the science offices and our editorial policy did not require us to send everything
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that we published up through um the official public affairs chain of command to be approved or disapproved by
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political appointees. Scientists reviewed our content and said whether or not it needed to be revised or changed
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in any way. Now, if you try to go to the climate.gov homepage, you can't get there anymore. they've redirected that
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site to to noah.gov/climate. And then on the noah.gov/climate page,
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they've removed any links um back to climate.gov. So you can't you can't find
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the front door of climate.gov anymore. You can still find the content if you had it bookmarked. Um you can still find
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it from search engines, but its front door has been barricaded or hidden. We
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don't expect them to leave climate.gov up. We we think, you know, I don't have any inside knowledge of their plans, but
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my guess is that in redirecting the homepage to noah.gov, they may plan to
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migrate over what they consider the good science, like the ENSO blog, um, and the
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polar vortex blog, things that aren't that are more focused on natural climate variability. Um, they may let some of
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that stuff survive and then take the rest offline. We don't expect that they were going to leave the whole site up.
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Have you gotten feedback from people who utilized this website like teachers?
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What have you heard from the community as far as this loss? People were very upset when when we were essentially
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shutting down operations in June um at the end of May. There were a few news stories about that and so people knew
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what was happening and um we see received a lot of email from people just
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saying no this is terrible you know what are we going to do and now that we've um
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decided to try to launch a nonprofit successor to climate.gov of climate. us.
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We have just been flooded with email from teachers and journalists and
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professors and not just in the US but you know in the UK and Germany and lots
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of different places saying how happy people are that we are going to try to rescue the site and the content and
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bring it back so that people um still have access to it. Okay. So tell me about how this idea
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came to be. This is clearly a personal project. Um, so tell me where this idea
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came from and and how it evolved and how you've now launched this nonprofit. We were all sort of reeling, you know,
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in May when when we learned that all the contractors were going to be let go and
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that that was essentially going to be the end. Um, our team had been working together, many of us, for more than a
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decade. The climate.gov gov was it wasn't just a job for us. It was a
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mission. We felt that we were providing an important public service and we were
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all really passionate about it. It was hard for us to think about our team dispersing um and going on to other
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things, especially with the possibility of all of this work that we had done and
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that the taxpayer had already paid for being taken offline or hidden from people. And so, you know, our first sort
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of group meetings that we had after we learned all this, you know, we were just trying to support each other and think
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about, you know, how can we help each other with what happens next. But for some of us, it became a thing where
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every time we would sit down at the computer, this is the way it was for me. every time I would sit down at the computer to think about updating my
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resume, you know, updating my my LinkedIn profile, thinking about where I
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might want to apply for jobs. Every time I tried to do that, I just couldn't stop thinking about the fact that they might
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be going to hide climate.gov or worse, that they were going to use it maybe to
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spread misinformation. Especially when the there was the report that came out from the Department of Energy where they
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handpicked five uh scientists to put out
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a report that challenged the notion that greenhouse gases were a a threat to
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human health and the environment. They said in a news release that they were considering going back and revising
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previous versions of the National Climate Assessment, um, which is the authoritative report on the impacts of
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climate change in the United States. I really began to worry they were going to do something even worse with climate.gov
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than just taking it offline. And so we just started to think, how can we make this right? What can we do? you know
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there science is being attacked in so many ways in this administration
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from the NIH to the CDC to the you know environmental sciences the EPA Noah NASA
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and it can feel overwhelming to people who believe that science provides useful
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important information essential information for us to make decisions our team just began to say well we can't do
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there are so many things we can't do anything about but this is our this is our backyard. This issue of censoring
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climate information from the public, that is something we can do something about. And so we just began to say what
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we need to do is we need to come up with a way to move climate.gov out of the federal domain, put it in the in the uh
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nonprofit sector where it can be where it will be immune from politics and it
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can, you know, stay true to its science-based mission. Um and so we just began talking about how do we make that
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happen? You know, we got a partner um an existing nonprofit called named Multiplier who is sort of an incubator
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for small fledgling nonprofits like us to provide fiscal and business
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operations support so that we didn't have to immediately try to apply for 501c3 status. we can operate through
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them and you know take advantage of leverage their expertise and knowledge
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and we hope that the you know the crowdsourcing funding um will allow us
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to cover some startup costs related to web hosting and web development and
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maybe uh a bit of a of a lifeboat salary for those of us who've been working for
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months without pay. Uh ultimately we do know that we're probably going to need foundation support from philanthropy uh
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and larger organizations and so we hope that that that we're able to make that happen. Tell me about the the data. How has that
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transition gone with getting what was in one place to a new place? And has there
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been roadblocks as far as getting access to certain data? How how has that worked
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out? Well, you know, all everything that we did on climate.gov of um and everything the government does is in the public
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domain. So we you know anyone could do this anyone could do this project.
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Obviously because it's our team we have more knowledge of the intricacies of the
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site and how it works and that sort of thing. But really there haven't been you know it's a pretty straightforward
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process in that there are lots of ways to clone a website and there are even
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existing archives of climate.gov of from you know the way back machine and um a
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project called web recorder and so we have clones we have copies of the site
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that we will be able to leverage now one of the challenges is most of the clones that exist either exist we have con we
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have clones that that existed before January which before we were required to move to
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remove content related to diversity and climate justice so there are clones that
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have that still have that content but then they don't have all of the content the news stories and data visualizations
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and everything that we made from January till operations stopped in June. So
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there are there are also clones that have most of that content. Um but then those clones are missing all
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of the diversity and inclusion content. Um, so we're just trying to we have to figure out the best way and we have
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technical folks that have, you know, that are who are wrestling with those questions about how do we bring those
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all those pieces back together to come up with a complete copy of what climate.gov should have been. What is
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the feedback been like? in the in the span of, you know, three weeks, we've raised, you know, over $100,000 through
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crowd sourcing. The email box for our our general questions and
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inquiries has has been like a fire hose. We've had hundreds and hundreds of um
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emails from people. People who were able to donate and said they were thrilled, you know, and they were so happy to see
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somebody doing this. Also, people who said, "I can't donate, but what you're doing is important." I think that that
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shows that research, surveys, public opinion polls show that a significant
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majority of Americans understand that climate change is real and that it's a
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problem and that they and they say they want the government and corporations to
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be doing more about it. And I think that's true, you know, regardless of
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party. That's, you know, it's something like there was a Pew study in 2023 or
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2024. Twothirds of Americans accept that climate change is happening and that we
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need to do something about it. Hiding information about climate is it's just
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wrong. And people need this information because climate change is real and it's
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happening. And at climate.gov, gov. We were never about trying to tell people
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what to do. The science only tells us what is going to happen if we do one thing or we don't do something. Our
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decisions as a society about what we're going to do. That depends on more than just the science. That depends on our
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values. How important are our institutions to us? How important is it
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that we have uh commercially uh robust fisheries, you know, in Alaska? How
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important is it to us that our communities are not threatened year after year with intense forest fires? We
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have to bring our values to bear. All we're trying to do with climate.gov is say this is what science says is likely
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to happen. To me, I think there's no there's no point in trying to hide that information. And frankly, it's immoral
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to hide it from people because our children, our grandchildren, they're going to inherit the climate that we're
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giving them now. And we can't be simultaneously handing them a problem and then hiding the information that
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they need to try to figure out what they're going to do. The amount of support that we've already seen is a
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sign that people recognize this. People know they need this information and they
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want to have access to it. What are your hopes for the future? Are you hoping that climate us is temporary and that
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you get back to the point where climate.gov is a thing again or both or what's
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the future? I think Yeah, I think you know and we talk about this a lot among our team who thinks
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that the government is going to come to its senses and and take climate.gov back um and other sorts other kinds of
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climate information. And um I I think that what we want to do with climate us
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is build a site that is resilient and flexible for whatever situation we find
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ourselves in in the future. There will always be parts of the climate communication and climate education,
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climate literacy space that um are really better done outside of the
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federal space. You know, one of the most frequent sorts of emails that we got and
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questions on social media, they would say, "We love your science content. We love this. Why can't you bring bring
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this same approach to talking about climate solutions?" Um, and you know,
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the response to that was always, well, that's not really Noah's domain. That's not Noah's part of Noah's mission. Um,
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and so it wasn't appropriate for us to be trying to, you know, talk about
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mitigation and steps that people could take outside of the federal fence though that would be acceptable and and
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appropriate. We would still bring the same rigor and sciencebased
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take on solutions. Um, and again, never being never telling people what to do,
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but only saying this is what you can do if you want. Um, so I still think that
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there would be elements that would be appropriate to sit outside the climate the federal fence and um, you know,
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climate.us could continue on with that. If things change and and Noah wants
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climate.gov back and wants to fund it, that would be fine, too. we could hand the science part back over
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to them um and carry on with some of the more relationship building, community
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building activities around mitigation um and how people can adapt to climate
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change. Um I think there'll be a role for both if the government does decide
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it's going to get back into that that space. So what can people expect if they go to
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climate us? What will they see there? How can the general American public take advantage of information there?
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Well, right now, basically just a um a description of our project and what we're trying to achieve. Um you can see
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how you can donate if you want. You can see the kinds of things that we want to
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bring back. We've tried to explain like this is the stuff that we, you know, the kind of content that we produced on
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climate.gov and what what we want to continue. Our first step, however, was
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as we were thinking about what needs to happen, climate.gov isn't the only climate information that the
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administration is taking offline. One of their first targets was the national
24:16
climate assessments and including the latest one, which is the fifth national
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climate assessment. And so we decided that what we wanted to do first was
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bring that website back online because uh the USGCP, the US global change
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research program uh that was responsible, congressionally mandated to produce periodic reports on the state of
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climate change and its impacts on the US was gutted earlier this year. um all the
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scientists that were working on the sixth national climate assessment um were fired. The fifth national climate
24:55
assessment and all the previous climate assessments were taken offline. So we thought given that they've interrupted
25:02
the development of the next climate assessment, we thought it was extremely important that the latest one, the most
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recent one that we have be back online, easy for people to find. especially as I
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say, news reports um suggested that they were considering revising previous
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national climate assessments. And so we thought it would be very important for
25:28
the originals to be up and accessible where people could see them um and know
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that they were there and trustworthy. So the first thing that we're going to do and we hope that it'll be within no more
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than you know a couple of weeks. Um we hope to have the n the fifth national climate assessment website back live on
25:47
the internet for people to find and use. After that we're probably going to take a strategy where we where we roll where
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we look at um climate.gov's of's most popular sections and content and try to
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bring bits and pieces back at a time, you know, a little bit every month.
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Target trying to get the um our event tracker where we covered extreme events
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and what climate uh influences might have um been at play in a particular
26:18
extreme weather event. We might try to bring that back first and then when we get that one brought over to climate us
26:24
then we might consider our global climate dashboard uh where we have little interactive graphs of all the
26:31
major indicators of global climate change like sea level rise, carbon dioxide, temperature, sea ice, those
26:38
kinds of things. So we we want to bring things back in pieces. Well, you got plenty to do there. Um
26:44
boy, we do. Why do you think that people try to silence climate science? Well,
26:51
people and institutions and you know and businesses, they don't like change.
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Human beings just in general um despite the fact that our adapt our our adaptability as a species is one of the
27:04
hallmarks of of humanity, we don't like to have to change. Um, and I think you
27:12
know the fossil fuel industry, they've made a lot of money over the years and they want to continue to make that
27:18
money. They want fossil fuel development to continue and to be the primary source
27:23
of energy. And so I think that they don't want the it being discussed um
27:28
what the science says about what's going to happen, what the impacts of
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unregulated completely, you know, continued high dependence on fossil
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fuels. They think that if they can maybe they think they can just keep that part quiet if nobody's talking about the fact
27:45
that the coral reefs you know may may go extinct um you know by 2070 I if we keep
27:54
pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere if we we don't talk about it then we can just carry on as we always
28:02
have. Climate change is happening and it's going to continue to happen whether or not they try to hide that information
28:09
from people. So there have been points in human history where terrible awful
28:16
things were happening that human beings didn't understand and couldn't predict.
28:22
massive volcanic eruptions that brought about the little ice age in in the
28:28
northern hemisphere or or the bubanic plague that decimated populations.
28:34
People did not know there were these horrible things happening that people
28:40
didn't understand, couldn't predict, did not know how to cope with. Here we are
28:45
at a point in time where we're facing a serious calamity. We now have the
28:51
information. We're not ignorant or helpless in the face of this challenge
28:58
the way we have been so many times in the past. We have the information to try
29:04
to tackle the problem. And yet there are people who want to try to hide that
29:09
information. And I'm thinking what have we been doing as a human species building knowledge and you know trying
29:17
to to understand the world better if it's not to try to solve problems and
29:22
relieve suffering you know but instead there are people who think let's just
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try to hide this and not talk about it leaving humanity to face this serious
29:35
challenge and risk with one hand with two hands behind their back you know,
29:40
tied behind their back. It's just I just think it's crazy. Rebecca, is there anything else you want
29:46
to add about your project? We are very interested in in developing partnerships and collaborations with
29:53
other people working in this space. You know, as I mentioned, the the cuts to science um across the government are
30:02
extreme, and we know that there are lots of other good programs um and efforts
30:08
that have also been cut and are struggling to figure out how they would
30:14
continue. We want to partner with people. We hope that climate us can be a
30:19
cornerstone for other groups who are trying to find a way to keep reaching
30:26
their audiences and to keep serving the public in the way they did. People who are looking to partner with us can reach
30:32
out to us at the info@climate. us email. We're eager to to collaborate.
30:40
Off the radar is a production of the National Weather Desk. Thank you for listening to this very important episode. If you like what you heard,
30:47
make sure you give us a follow on your favorite podcast platform, and please share it with a friend. You can also
30:52
follow Off the Radar on Instagram for more weather and climate updates and clips from the show. Thank you to
30:58
Rebecca Lindsay for joining me today. If you want to contribute to Rebecca's mission to bring back this climate
31:04
information to the public, you can visit climate.us to donate. In the last week since I interviewed Rebecca, they have
31:10
successfully put the fifth national climate assessment back online. This episode of Off the Radar was hosted,
31:17
produced, and edited by me with writing and research help from my associate producer, Brian Petus. Thank you for
31:23
listening. I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie. Make it a great day. [Music]
***
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