Now, here in Britain, we're experiencing yet another massive heat wave.

In fact, the fifth of the season to hit Europe, and the world's oceans reached their highest temperatures ever recognized for July.

Now, more than ever, people need reliable information.

And in the United States, the federal government's climate.gov website has been considered one of the most trusted sources of climate information, that is, until the Trump administration shut it down.

The site's manager, Rebecca Lindsey, was laid off along with all of her colleagues, and she lays out the stakes with Hari Sreenivasan.

Christiane, thanks.

Rebecca Lindsey, thanks so much for joining us.

So in 2025, the Trump administration laid off hundreds of employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Shortly after, the website that was called Climate.gov, that was a critical source of climate information, was shut down.

And as the website's program manager, you were among the 280,000 federal workers who lost their jobs during that period.

Rebecca, I guess, first of all, for people who are unaware, what is Climate.us and why does it need to be in the first place?

Climate.us is the nonprofit successor of NOAA's Climate.gov website.

We are a public information portal to provide climate information, data, tools, educational resources to the public to help people understand climate and to make decisions to protect themselves and the things they care about.

So what happened to climate.gov?

The new administration in winter of last year shut down the entire program.

I was a federal employee.

I was fired within a couple of months.

The remainder of my teammates who were federal contractors were removed from their contract, and the whole team was basically disbanded.

And you had been working there for how long?

Give me an idea of how large the team was and what you would do to put this site together.

>> I had been there about 15 years.

Climate.gov wasn't just a website.

It was a climate education and literacy program that NOAA supported to help NOAA understand what kinds of information the public and teachers and the media wanted about climate and then provide that for them.

At the end of 2024, if an American Googled climate in their browser, climate.gov was the top organic result.

We had been working very hard.

We had more than 600,000 followers on social media.

The team took very seriously our duty as public servants to try to help the public find the information about climate that they needed.

So the administration didn't specifically say why this was being shut down.

When you go to the old site, there was a message for visitors that said, "In compliance with Executive Order 14303, future research products previously housed under climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate website."

So when you look at that, doesn't the information still exist and isn't it still accessible to Americans?

Well what you'll notice is when you go to NOAA.gov/climate, that was the home page of climate.gov has been redirected to that page permanently.

And then all of the links on that page that previously pointed users back to resources on climate.gov have been stripped from that page.

So essentially, it's what they've done is it's sort of like they renovated a store and had the front door open into a closet.

You go in, there's no pathway out to the kinds of information that we had on climate.gov.

Now, it's true that there's lots of climate information still available from NOAA.

You will find the climate data, the monthly reports, the annual summary of the state of the climate.

So you will find things that tell you, for example, that 2025 was, you know, so many degrees above the pre-industrial average.

What you won't find any more easily is any explanation of why that is, why the past 10 years have been the hottest years in the historical record.

No discussion about the human influence on climate or the potential impacts that the world and the country is going to experience from climate change.

They have sort of, they seem to have retreated to a position where all they're going to do is provide data.

They're going to have a server, they're going to have, you know, they're going to have files that, you know, people can download and get data.

But what Climate.gov did and what Climate.us is going to do is build that bridge between the data and the public that needs things explained with non-technical terms in plain language.

We made a big effort to go to the data and develop data visualizations and graphics that tell the story so that we're not just telling people global sea level is rising.

We go to the data, we pull it, we make a map, we show people this is how sea level has risen in the past century.

That sort of bridge building and interpretation and context, that is what the federal government and NOAA in particular is retreating from.

I mean, you can see the numbers, but without any kind of interpretation, we're not going to make policy decisions on what's important to us based on those numbers if we don't really understand what those numbers mean or what context they're in.

Yes, I think one thing that we heard a lot, we had our fair number of critics in all the years we were operating at NOAA.

People who deny the reality of climate change would write in and complain to us.

And frequently their criticisms and their outrage revolved around this idea that somehow science was trying to tell them what to do.

Science is, you know, you're giving us this information and now you're forcing us to make changes we don't want to make or interfere with the free market in ways we don't like.

But the science only tells us what's happening.

What we choose to do about it, that is based on our values, based on what matters to us.

And the reality is climate, responding to human caused climate change is not just going to be about reducing our emissions.

We have to think about adaptation and resilience at the same time.

I wish that people would accept that science and scientists are not trying to tell us what to do.

They're trying to tell us what is going to happen.

And why would we not want to have that information?

Can you tell me a little bit more about the information that is now missing from the government websites?

Climate.gov, as I say, technically the site is still there, but the entire website of the U.S.

Global Change Research Program, which is the congressionally mandated organization that Congress created in 1990 to help the nation understand and prepare for the impacts of human-caused climate change, the administration disbanded all of those scientists and completely took the entire website offline.

So now all of the most authoritative reports on climate impacts in the United States have been taken down.

At the EPA, a whole section of the site which had what they called their climate change indicators, which is all kinds of different data-driven examples of how climate is affecting things that Americans care about, like stream flow and the timing of the spring growing season.

All of those different indicators of how climate is affecting our world have been taken down.

So there's just, it's again, it's that collection of resources that are interpreting the science and the data for a non-technical audience.

Those are the resources that are disappearing from across the federal science space.

In this restoration, you're working with just two other women here, one including your sister, who was also part of the agency.

But how are you managing to try to keep a copy, essentially, of an entire federal site with just three people?

Well, so we are very fortunate that in addition to sites like the Internet Archive, there was, people began in late 2024 anticipating that the government, the new administration, was not going to be friendly to climate.

And so people began making clones of the site and the technology now exists that pretty much anyone can go to a website and clone it.

So we have -- the technical challenges are actually the least of our challenges.

And we were -- the fact that we -- you know, the fact that we were able to stand up an almost complete clone of the site with just our three people and then we hired contractors using some of the crowd source funding that we have raised.

We launched essentially a GoFundMe when we started this initiative.

And we used that money to hire web developers to rebuild the clone of the site that launched at the end of June.

The hard part is restoring and resuming our day-to-day operations, producing stories, engaging with our audience, keeping abreast of what's in the news and trying to understand what kinds of climate information would be relevant to public and current events.

That takes a team, and it's a team that we don't yet have the resources to hire.

I'm the writer and the editor.

My sister Mary is the lead data visualizer.

We have another woman named Anna Eshelman, who is our graphics, graphic design and layout person.

But we really need double that staff.

And that the government, I would argue, was the right person, the right entity to support that, because this is in the realm of public education.

This is the kind of thing that benefits all of society.

And, you know, finding foundations and private donors to support this work, it's been a challenge.

And we, you know, we aren't sure, we still aren't sure exactly how much of Climate.gov's operations and activities we're going to be able to actually resume.

But we're just, we've taken this risk and we're just going to keep trying.

So I wonder, has the tone of the content changed?

Have you been writing differently?

Have you been a bigger advocate?

Because it seems like if you had none of the restrictions of the government that perhaps some of the content would be different?

Or do you have kind of a different goal in mind?

At this point, we do not intend to change our editorial focus or our workflows.

We take very seriously and we take pride in the fact that some media watchdogs, websites describe us as pro-science but nonpartisan.

And that's a reputation and a standard that we intend to keep.

We do not intend to begin doing more advocacy for getting people to do something about climate.

What we may do that's different is NOAA's mission did not extend very deeply into the science of mitigation of climate change.

And there is science behind all of these ideas that people are considering for not just reducing emissions, but potentially enhancing ocean natural processes in the ocean to sequester more carbon, planting more trees to absorb more carbon.

There's even technology that's being studied and tested to do what's called direct air capture, where they literally come up with ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into fuel or turn it into carbon fiber to be used to build things.

We might have the capacity, the ability, now that we are no longer, you know, under NOAA and solely focused on NOAA's mission, we might have the ability to begin publishing content and explainers about the science behind mitigation.

But even if we do sort of widen our editorial scope topic-wise, the framing is always going to be the same.

It is about the science of these things and not about trying to persuade people or companies to do those things.

We want to stick very strongly to nonpartisan providing information.

I wonder if a more climate friendly administration comes back into office.

Do you want to hand over the keys to climate.us?

I mean, is the goal here to create something that will outlast every administration that comes in, regardless of who's... That is our goal.

Yes, I'm sorry to interrupt you there.

That is our goal.

We, you know, the fact that this was... that it was so easy for this administration to dismantle all of these communication activities around climate science, I think it's, you know, I consider it evidence that we should not make a site that has such an important mission so vulnerable again.

I also think that potentially bringing it out of the federal firewall creates an opportunity to partner more broadly with organizations across different levels of government, state governments, tribal governments, local communities.

And so in a way, it may make the site more able to be the all of society source of information that the country really needs.

However, we don't know what's going to happen.

Are people trusting institutions less where they're willing to believe climate.us is just as credible as the site that it's replacing?

That's an important question and it's one that is sort of, you know, I have to consider it an open question.

It's a hypothesis.

We know that people did over the past 20 years or so, or 20 years ago, did consider the federal government and the science agencies of the federal government to be authoritative, credible sources of information.

And we leveraged that.

Climate.gov's popularity and reach and trust from our readership, it did play -- it had to have played a part.

And it's very kind of mind-bending to think about there would have always been a minority of people who didn't trust the government and didn't trust us simply because we were government.

And now we're in this position where a whole different kind of American mistrusts the government because of what's happened in this administration.

And so, you know, yes, there's a possibility, a risk, that being outside of the federal space, we will struggle to have the same level of perceived credibility and authoritativeness.

But there's also the risk that going back, trying to let the government take back over this kind of operation is going to have a whole new, larger crop of Americans who do not trust it.

And our plan is to try to work with scientific organizations, but also to try to go as deeply as we need to into communities to find the people that different segments of America think are reputable and trustworthy and connect with them and say, "Okay, what do you want to know about climate?

How could we help you find the data and the tools and the things that you and your community need to make decisions and to feel more secure?

We are probably just going to have to work harder to build those relationships and not rely on the cachet of the federal brand."

The director and managing editor of climate.us, Rebecca Lindsey.

Thanks so much for your time.