The federal government relocated and stopped funding a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website that provides climate data and research on June 27, following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
The site, called Climate.Gov, was consolidated with NOAA’s main website to comply with a May 23 executive order that aimed to rebuild public trust in federal scientific research by promoting principles such as transparency and unbiased peer review. In addition to the shutdown, roughly 10% of NOAA’s workforce has been laid off since March, according to the Associated Press.
Danielle Touma, an assistant research professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, said the loss of Climate.Gov will impact citizens seeking information about climate change and researchers wanting to obtain new, free and accurate data sets. Research published before the transition will still be available on NOAA’s site.
“(The site) provides the public with a lot of information regarding climate events,” Touma said. “It doesn’t just talk about the cost of the event, (but) usually they have a lot of information about a certain event, so you can understand why the events happened.”
Touma said she relies on data sets like the ones the site provided to interpret the impact and cause of climate disasters, such as the recent floods in Kerrville.
“(The Kerville Floods are) an event that would end up being included in that database,” Touma said. “The fact that it won’t be updated anymore means that the public won’t be able to go to a very trusted source.”
Zoey Kaul, a founder of the Plant Futures Initiative UT chapter, an organization working to establish plant-centric communities in college, said Texas is especially vulnerable to the loss of Climate.Gov.
“Texas is actually the most at-risk state for billion-dollar climate disasters in the country,” UT alumna Kaul said. “We’re a really crucial case to consider when defunding climate data and reducing the ability to forecast weather because we are just so at risk for these disasters.”
Kaul said that the Plant Futures Initiative is especially concerned with how the cuts will affect food production and security across Texas.
“Information that was made available on (the site) was publicly accessible,” Kaul said. “Having free public climate data levels the playing field for everyone, especially those smaller rural farmers who are trying to produce food.”
Touma said that living in Texas for the past two years has made her especially aware of the necessity for the data the site provided.
“Even though I’m a climate scientist, I can’t sit and analyze every single data set to understand what to expect,” Touma said. “It’s quite a shame that information won’t be as easily found by the public.”
English (US) ·