The government erased it. A nonprofit resurrected it.
Climate.gov, the federal government’s flagship climate data portal, disappeared from the internet on January 21, 2026—one day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Executive Order 14199 mandated the removal of all climate-related resources from federal domains. No warning. No backup plan. Just a 404 error and a black hole where crucial data once lived.
Yesterday, that data came back. Climate.us, a new nonprofit, relaunched the site with a complete copy of the original archive. Every dataset. Every map. Every temperature graph and sea-level projection. The digital corpse of Climate.gov has been resurrected on a private server, hosted under a .us domain, and it’s all free to access.
The Purge Was Brutal
The Trump administration didn’t just take down Climate.gov. They went scorched earth. NOAA’s climate pages vanished. NASA’s Earth science portals went dark. The National Climate Assessment, a legally mandated report, was scrubbed from all government URLs. The message was clear: climate science doesn’t exist if no one can read it.
Scientists panicked. Researchers who depended on federal data streams found their work suddenly untenable. Journalists covering extreme weather had to rely on foreign sources. Even state and local governments, which used federal climate projections for infrastructure planning, were left blind.
“It was like someone burned the library, then bulldozed the ashes,” said Dr. Elena Torres, a climatologist at Columbia University. “We had backups of some things, but nothing comprehensive. Nothing official.”
Enter Climate.us. The nonprofit launched in March 2026, funded by a coalition of tech philanthropists and environmental foundations. Their mission: crawl the internet for every scrap of federal climate data that existed before the purge and rebuild the archive.
“This isn’t about politics. It’s about preserving facts.” — Sarah Chen, Climate.us director
How They Did It
The team used Wayback Machine snapshots, academic repositories, and private copies shared by former government employees. They reconstructed the Climate.gov database byte by byte. By June, they had 98% of the original content — including interactive tools like the Sea Level Rise Viewer and the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit.
The relaunch went live at midnight Eastern Time. Within hours, traffic surged to over 200,000 visitors. The server held. “We expected a crush,” said IT lead Mark Rivera. “What surprised me was the gratitude. People sent emails saying they cried when they saw the maps again.”
But the site isn’t just a copy. Climate.us added new features: a downloadable data API, bilingual Spanish-English interfaces, and a “citizen scientist” portal where users can upload local weather observations. It’s an upgrade, not a replica.
The Legal Gray Zone
Can a private entity legally republish government data after the government removed it? The law is murky. Federal data is generally public domain, but the Trump administration could argue that the executive order classifies the material as “controlled unclassified information.” No lawsuits have been filed yet, but Climate.us has a legal team on retainer.
“We’re on solid First Amendment ground,” said Ethan Park, the nonprofit’s general counsel. “Data that was once freely distributed by the government cannot be retroactively locked away. The people own this information.”
Critics, mostly conservative pundits, accuse Climate.us of undermining national security by “weaponizing climate propaganda.” The nonprofit shrugs off the attacks. “They say the data is biased,” Chen responded. “Fine. Release the raw data yourself. Let the public decide.”
What This Means
This is more than a website resurrection. It’s a test of institutional resilience in an era of political instability. If a president can delete a federal agency’s entire digital footprint with a stroke of a pen, what stops the next president from doing the same to health data, financial records, or census findings?
Climate.us sets a precedent. It proves that non-state actors can preserve public knowledge when the government abandons its duty. It also raises uncomfortable questions: Should climate data be decentralized from the start? Should the government ever be the sole custodian of scientific information?
For now, the scientists are relieved. The data flows again. But the scar remains. “We shouldn’t need a nonprofit to run our climate services,” Torres said. “The government’s job is to serve the people. When it refuses, we have to serve ourselves.”
Climate.us is a lifeline. It’s also a warning. The next purge might not be so easy to reverse.
