I’ve come to honor Labor Day heroes who aren’t even working for pay.
ITEM 1: Fired Federal Employees Are Bringing Climate Change Info Back to the People. Scientists are preserving vital climate-related information amid the regime’s attacks on climate science.
“Since June 23, a group of former employees of the communications branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been busily resurrecting one of the government’s premier educational websites on climate change.
“Climate.gov was started in the early 2010s by communicators with NOAA, and for more than a decade it consistently produced high-quality graphics and other charts documenting rising global temperatures, changing rain patterns, drought conditions, El Niño impacts, and other climate-related data….
“In February 2025, as the so-called ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) purges accelerated, most of the staff and contractors attached to the website were fired…
Let me interrupt this with something I did not fully know:
ITEM 2: DOGE officially shuts down on July 4, 2026!
“But the initiative did not come without a cost to taxpayers. In December 2025, the executive director of the environmental nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) claimed the [regime] cost taxpayers an estimated $10 billion in 2025 through its deferred resignation program.
“Ironically, this unreasonably costly mass idling of civil servants was done in the name of ‘government efficiency.’
Back to our main story:
“A year after Climate.gov’s demise, [former employees] resurrected the vast majority of its materials…The new, privately run site is Climate.us, and it contains a wealth of sophisticated data sets and graphics on the world’s climate…”
Their work has inspired ex-government employees in several other agencies.
Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) communicators are… now looking to resurrect climate-related EPA pages that have been taken down; a group called the Public Environmental Data Partners is attempting to rescue specialist environmental monitoring tools — it has some information online, but not yet a fully interactive website. Another group, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, is working to save specialized environmental justice screening tools. As the [regime] deliberately shreds decades of climate-related research, ex-government employees are attempting to ride to the rescue by creating a sort of shadow information-dispersal system. The American Geophysical Union, which most U.S. Earth scientists are members of, has been instrumental in putting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back on track after the Trump administration pulled support for its annual reports….
Replacement
The Climate.us site now is seeing close to a million visitors a month, putting it up there with where the NOAA-run site was before its demise. Teachers use it frequently, as do an array of others simply trying to get an accurate read on what is happening to the climate.
As with the old government-run website, Climate.us has a network of scientific advisers around the country willing to lend their expertise to the project and to make sure that what the communications people write up is scientifically accurate.
Preserving “this vital climate-related information in an era of administration-enforced environmental ignorance has become a mission. ‘Climate information shouldn’t be available to the public just on a political basis or a whim.’ There ought to be a way to ‘promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions.'”
I shared this news with a former dedicated employee of one of the agencies mentioned, and they were thrilled and heartened that the work they had participated in could be preserved.
“SO glad to see this! It reminds me of how people hurriedly photocopied files that Anne Gorsuch wanted destroyed under ray-gun. I knew some of them.” Not incidentally, Anne Gorsuch was the mother of current SCOTUS justice Neil Gorsuch.
They mentioned the Wayback Machine; unfortunately, I have found that route to climate.gov unsuccessful.
These unpaid workers are heroes, in my book. So on Labor Day, let me salute those who are doing the work to undo ignorance.
With all the bad ecological news –