Former NOAA employees criticise shutdown of Climate.gov

By Mia MacGregor

June 26 - (The Insurer) - ​​The decision to discontinue Climate.gov, a prominent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-owned resource for climate science, has drawn criticism from former employees of the platform and NOAA itself.

Climate.gov served novice data users in various sectors, including the insurance industry, natural resource management and community planning. The website was shut down on June 24.

Rachel Brittin, former deputy director of external affairs at NOAA, called the shutdown “a reckless step backward”.

Speaking to The Insurer, Brittin described the platform as one of the government’s most trusted tools for making climate science accessible to the public, noting its use by planners, educators, businesses and communities to prepare for real-world risks.

“Eliminating it would silence a vital source of truth at a time when climate resilience has never been more urgent,” she said.

“It’s happening on a day when millions of Americans are experiencing extreme heat, an experience that is only going to become more extreme moving forward in the face of increasing impacts of climate change.”

Rebecca Lindsey, former program manager, lead writer and editor for Climate.gov, emphasised the impact of the shutdown on user accessibility.

“By redirecting the Climate.gov homepage to a NOAA.gov subpage, it’s as if they took down the map at the entrance of a park. All the park features are still there and accessible if you already know how to find them,” she explained.

However, Lindsey noted that while content pages from Climate.gov are still accessible through search engines and bookmarks, "how long this will remain true is the big unknown".

In its statement to The Insurer, NOAA explained that the move was in compliance with Executive Order 14303, Restoring Gold Standard Science, aimed at centralising and consolidating resources.

The agency assured that future research products previously hosted on Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov and its affiliate websites.

This latest development follows The Insurer reporting in May that NOAA was shuttering its database of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. This tool was used by the insurance industry to track the economic costs of extreme weather events.

AM Best warned the same month that the removal of the database could impede insurance companies’ ability to track losses due to secondary perils, data that is used in their modelling, pricing, reinsurance and risk management.

The rating agency added that private companies may have to step in to fill the void "and it could take some years to build credibility and trust among market participants".