When news broke that climate.gov was about to go dark in June, Jeffrey Grant scrambled to download as many graphs and data tables from the website as he could. The high school biology teacher had relied heavily on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website to teach students about climate change, showing data on carbon dioxide levels and asking the students to analyze trends and make connections like real climatologists. "Science is always expanding," says Grant, who works at Downers Grove North High School in Illinois. "So, it is important that I always provide them with the latest research. Otherwise, they just have to take my word for it."
Grant is not alone. As the school year kicked into gear this fall, educators across the country have been reworking lesson plans and searching for reliable sources of up-to-date scientific information. The climate.gov URL, which was shuttered after President Donald Trump's administration terminated 10 science communication and data visualization experts who maintained it, now redirects web users to a NOAA web page on climate that contains a fraction of the original information. A NOAA spokesperson says the move was "an effort to centralize and consolidate resources."
Since taking office in January, Trump has moved to restrict climate change research and education and retreat from U.S. commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Just last week, he told world leaders at the United Nations that climate change was "the greatest con job ever perpetrated." As part of the campaign, officials have deleted climate data sets used by scientists and the public or made them more difficult to reach.
Many science teachers depended on those resources. The Next Generation Science Standards, which were created by a consortium of states and nonprofit organizations to provide guidance on what K-12 students should know, recommend introducing humanmade climate change in fifth grade and weaving it through all science classes. But that may become increasingly difficult if teachers can't readily find the information they need. "The more time it takes for them to find those things, the less apt they're going to use it. So that's discouraging," Grant says.
The cuts go beyond climate.gov to sites explicitly designed for educators, such as the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), a University of Colorado Boulder project funded by NOAA. The program, which is home to more than 800 lessons and videos covering topics such as droughts, wildfires, energy efficiency, and climate anxiety for high school- and college-level courses, went into hibernation on 31 August after it was defunded. "It's not just a priority for NOAA anymore and not something that they see worthwhile to spend money on," says Gina Fiorile-Desranleau, a former CLEAN program coordinator who was laid off.
The lessons and videos remain on CLEAN's website. But unless new funding materializes, there will be no staff support to update the lessons with new data.
Breck Foster, a teacher at Lake Oswego High School in Oregon who weaves climate change into her social studies classes, says she has used disappearing resources as an opportunity to teach about politics and science. "I've shown my students in real time as materials have been taken off the internet, materials that we have used. I've called attention to that not in a political way, but just to say this is what happens when any administration will have political changes," she says.
Some nonprofit organizations have been scrambling to fill the void. Margaret Wang-Aghania, executive director and co-founder of SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that curates and develops free teaching materials, says her organization is spending a lot of time reworking lesson plans and finding replacement data -- a strain for her small 15-person team.
"As an organization, you always want to be moving forward -- building and reaching more teachers -- not backtracking and fixing these things," Wang-Aghania says. Right now, SubjectToClimate's resources are instead being utilized "just to maintain what we already have." For instance, the organization was forced to find a new data source for a lesson on sea level rise in January after a data set on ice thickness in Antarctica vanished from a government website.
Former NOAA employees hope to mitigate the loss of climate.gov. "We intend to restore all that content ... outside the federal domain, where it is safe from further political interference," says Rebecca Lindsey, former program manager of climate.gov. "It's absolutely critical that teachers continue to have access to that type of resource," she says.
Lindsey's team is currently crowdfunding. If they can raise enough money, she says they will produce updates and new content and post the materials on climate.us, an independent, nongovernmental website. "To make smart, effective decisions about climate change, we need unbiased, uncensored information," she argues.