Scientists, companies, ex-NOAA staff race to restore axed climate data

It was a setback — but no surprise — for founders of Crosswalk Labs when the Trump administration proposed to eliminate a program requiring thousands of power-producing and industrial sites to report greenhouse gas emissions.

Crosswalk Labs officials already had a Plan B peer-reviewed and ready to go, said Jason Burnett, CEO of the hyperlocal carbon emissions data platform.

Carbon dioxide emissions from a power plant or industrial facility can still be calculated by looking at the release of carbon monoxide, a criteria air pollutant that facilities report under the Clean Air Act, Burnett said during an interview.

"If you know how much carbon monoxide is released, and you know the emission factor for carbon monoxide for a turbine, you can then calculate how much natural gas that turbine consumed and therefore how much carbon dioxide was released," Burnett said. "I won't say our estimates will be as good, but they'll be the best available."

Across the US, scientists and researchers are working on initiatives to resurrect and maintain publicly available greenhouse gas databases and climate information the Trump administration discontinued over the past eight months. Among those cut were the nation's greenhouse gas inventory and a flagship annual climate assessment report, as well as a database showing the increasing frequency of billion-dollar weather disasters.

Scientists, researchers and private-sector players say they hope the information, while imperfect and at times incomplete, offers a stopgap for the people and businesses that rely on regular climate data.

The White House did not return a request for comment on initiatives to restore databases federal agencies shut down. "If there's a market for this data, the government shouldn't need to provide it," the US Environmental Protection agency said in an email.

EPA's proposed rule to rescind the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program would save American businesses up to $2.4 billion in regulatory costs while maintaining the agency's statutory obligations under the Clean Air Act, the agency spokesperson said in an email.

Climate.gov resurrected as Climate.us

Rebecca Lindsey used to spend her days producing content that more than 1 million users accessed every month. That was before February layoffs cost Lindsey her job as editor and lead writer of www.climate.gov, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration platform.

After the site was shut down in May, Lindsey and two former colleagues, along with some volunteers, have been using web crawlers that locate earlier versions of sites to create a cloned platform under the new domain name www.climate.us.

The new site will include information about climate justice, diversity and inclusion that Lindsey and her colleagues were told to delete in the weeks before they were let go. The process is time-consuming.

"Nothing has been lost," Lindsey said. "There's just a bit of technical slicing and dicing and shuffling that our that our web folks are going to have to do. Because we want to make sure that what we bring back is climate.gov as it should have been."

The first subsection of climate.us published on Sept. 23, featuring the unredacted Fifth National Climate Assessment released in 2023. Posting the original version of that report became a priority for the team after Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNN in August that the administration plans to "come out with updated reports."

In April, the administration dismissed scientists working on the next edition of the national climate report. Some of those authors have since regrouped to instead produce an academic paper outlining the most pressing research priorities on climate change challenges the US faces today.

Meanwhile, the creators of climate.us hope their site will eventually serve the same audiences that flocked to NOAA's original platform. Many were educators looking for data and visuals to show students how climate systems work, as well as the public and decision-makers in climate-related professions, such as natural resource managers and insurers.

Lindsey and her colleagues were working without pay for several months but recently received a foundation grant that will pay their wages for nine weeks. They also raised nearly $120,000 through crowdsourcing since launching the new domain in early September.

A heavy lift

Researchers worry that climate denial and a lack of resources will undermine transparency and understanding of US greenhouse gas emission trends and climate impacts.

"Climate change requires a collective response," said Max Dugan-Knight, a climate data researcher with Deep Sky, a Canadian carbon removal company. "The problem for climate scientists is that we want to make it feel very real to people ... making clear that risks are going up and that people understand that."

NOAA's cancellation of its data collection on billion-dollar disasters is a big loss, Dugan-Knight said during an interview. He now worries US federal agencies may also cut back on measurements of atmospheric emissions and sea level ice — data that complement the European research he depends on.

Decades of robust and widely available US government data on air emissions and the changing climate cannot easily be reproduced by nonprofits or academics, Dugan-Knight warned.

Still, the Climate Central nonprofit in July began to publish data from NOAA's abolished billion-dollar disaster program. Leading the effort is Adam Smith, who for 20 years served as lead scientist for the program while at NOAA. The new version "will closely align with the original," but the site and its development is still in a planning phase, Climate Central spokesperson Abbie Veitch said in an email.

EIA reports canceled, delayed

Researchers worry about the quality and consistency of government reports going forward.

Nicolas Fulghum, a senior data analyst with the think tank Ember in London, said he recently reached out to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) after learning that the agency will not publish its International Energy Outlook this year due to staff cuts.

The agency told him "they will continue to publish their regularly scheduled reports for now, but obviously everything is currently subject to change in US government agencies," Fulghum wrote in an email.

EIA spokesperson Chris Higginbotham confirmed that this year's international energy outlook was canceled. Higginbotham said some other reports, including the Uranium Marketing Annual Report due out in June, were delayed.

The agency is set to lose 107 employees, or about one-third of its workforce, based on the EIA's 2026 budget request.