Preserving Climate Knowledge Means Preserving Its Context - From Climate.gov to Climate.us: Why This Story Matters in Boulder

When the federal government dismantled the team behind NOAA’s Climate.gov in 2025, it did more than close a public-information service. It placed 15 years of climate explanations, maps, teaching materials and data resources at risk.

Former Climate.gov program manager Rebecca Lindsey and several of her former colleagues responded by rebuilding the resource outside government. Launched in June 2026, Climate.us is an independent nonprofit successor intended to keep reliable climate information publicly available and protected from political interference. Climate.gov had attracted more than 15 million visits annually before its daily operations ended.

For Boulder, this is not a distant Washington story.

A community built around public science

Boulder is one of the country’s most important centers for atmospheric and Earth-system science. NOAA’s Boulder campus conducts climate and weather research, collects and distributes environmental data, monitors the atmosphere and develops forecasts and information products used across the United States.

The connection extends deeply into the University of Colorado. The Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, was established as a CU Boulder–NOAA partnership in 1967. Around half of its researchers work alongside federal scientists in NOAA facilities, contributing to climate research, atmospheric chemistry, forecasting, Earth-system data and space-weather science.

Some of the information now preserved by Climate.us comes directly from this Boulder scientific ecosystem. Its greenhouse-gas dashboard, for example, draws on NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, operated by the Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder.

Members of the revived Climate.us team also have Colorado connections. Lindsey earned her master’s degree in journalism and technical communication from Colorado State University, while longtime Climate.gov contributor Michon Scott graduated from CU Boulder and has worked with the Boulder-based National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The effects of NOAA’s reduction were felt directly here. In March 2025, more than 1,000 people gathered outside Boulder’s David Skaggs Research Center to protest the layoffs. Current employees estimated that approximately 10 percent of NOAA’s roughly 800 Boulder workers had been dismissed.

Climate.us therefore represents something Boulder understands well: scientists and communicators treating their work not simply as employment, but as a public mission.

Preserving science also means updating it

The rescue of Climate.gov’s archive raises an important question:

When should historical scientific material carry a warning that scientific thinking has changed?

Some archived pages use RCP8.5, and later SSP5-8.5, to describe an extremely high-emissions future. These are scenarios used as inputs to climate models—not climate models themselves. They were valuable for exploring severe outcomes, but were sometimes presented to the public as “business as usual.”

That description no longer reflects mainstream scientific judgment. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report considered the likelihood of RCP8.5- or SSP5-8.5-type emissions pathways to be low in light of changes in energy technology, policy and emissions trends.

The new scenario framework being developed for CMIP7—the next major international generation of climate modelling—still includes high-end climate risks. However, it requires scenarios to cover a wide but plausible range of emissions rather than simply repeating SSP5-8.5 as the standard extreme pathway.

Older research should not be erased. But archived pages could include a notice such as:

This page has been preserved as part of the historical scientific record. Its use of RCP8.5 represents a very-high-emissions scenario and should not be interpreted as the most likely current trajectory.

That distinction matters. Public trust is not built by suggesting that science never changes. It is built by explaining what changed, why it changed and which findings remain valid.

Boulder’s responsibility

Climate.us is preserving more than a website. It is preserving the connection between scientific institutions and the people they serve.

For Colorado’s UNA in Boulder, that mission reflects a broader principle of international cooperation: climate knowledge should remain open, understandable and subject to continuing scientific review. Governments, universities, nonprofit organizations and scientists all have roles to play.

Boulder has spent generations building institutions dedicated to observing the planet and communicating what those observations mean. Supporting the former NOAA team behind Climate.us—and encouraging it to place historical research in its latest scientific context—is one way our community can help keep that public mission alive.