Climate.gov Didn't Fit Trump's "Gold Standard"

Dismantling climate.gov is not an accident; it is a blueprint.

Well, I didn’t expect confirmation so soon, but we now know how this administration will be using the “gold standard science” executive order (EO) and the subsequent OSTP guidance: to undo science that is politically inconvenient to them. One day—that’s right, one day—after agencies received instructions on how to implement the EO, the Trump administration acted. The administration cites at the top of the new noaa.gov/climate webpage the “gold standard science” EO and the OSTP implementation guidance to justify dismantling climate.gov, one of the government’s most trusted and accessible portals for climate science. The portal’s domain was shut down, its content team was disbanded, and its materials were scattered or buried. No public explanation was given. But the implications are clear: under the guise of promoting scientific rigor, the administration is now moving to erase or sideline science it doesn't want the public to see.

A portal built for openness—erased overnight

For nearly fifteen years, climate.gov was NOAA’s climate-science crown jewel. It offered:

• Live, downloadable datasets that linked straight to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)—everything from century-long temperature records to sea-level rise projections.

• Interactive tools—map viewers, data mappers, and model visualizers that let teachers, reporters, and city planners test assumptions in real time.

• Plain-language explainers vetted by PhD scientists and posted alongside full methodological notes and source code.

In other words, the site embodied precisely the virtues the new EO trumpets as “Gold Standard Science”: reproducible, transparent, clearly communicating error and uncertainty, and subject to peer review.

Yet on May 31, the contract that funded the portal’s editorial team lapsed, and on June 24, the standalone domain vanished. While remnants of climate.gov still remain, including some archived pages and select educational resources now housed elsewhere on NOAA’s site, it’s clear that much has changed.

The shift signals not just a website reorganization, but an intention by the administration to tighten control over how climate science is framed and accessed. The redirection away from a trusted, curated portal toward a stripped-down landing page, combined with the invocation of the “gold standard” EO, suggests that the goal isn’t just modernization, but politicized gatekeeping of federal science.

The administration’s likely alibi: “It wasn’t gold-standard science.”

If you press the White House, you probably won’t hear them admit a political motive. Instead, they will almost certainly point to the EO’s nine-point definition and claim the portal fell short, perhaps because “uncertainty wasn’t transparent enough,” or because the site didn’t host every single piece of raw data underlying every scientific statement.

That excuse doesn’t hold up.

• Reproducibility? Climate.gov consistently links its graphs to primary datasets, complete with metadata and documentation that enable independent verification.

• Transparency? Many figures on climate.gov include source citations and uncertainty ranges, complete with explanations.

• Peer review? Climate.gov’s content undergoes multiple layers of expert scrutiny. Reports are peer-reviewed internally and externally, vetted by qualified scientists, and when summarizing outside studies, articles link directly to original, peer-reviewed literature.

If climate.gov failed some hidden compliance test, the EO’s guidance doesn’t say what that test is. What it does provide is a discretionary loophole: agency heads can decide whether a body of work meets the new standard. In other words, the same political appointees who dislike federal climate messaging now enjoy veto power over whether it is “rigorous” enough to publish. That is not a recipe for improved science; it is a recipe for censorship dressed up as quality control.

Silence that speaks volumes

In yesterday’s post on OSTP’s EO guidance, I argued that the guidance’s greatest flaw was what it left unsaid. There are no mentions of guardrails against political interference or of how the administration will ensure protection for scientists who speak inconvenient truths. The destruction of climate.gov reveals a second and more insidious flaw in OSTP’s guidance: its weaponizable definitions. Anything that displeases a political superior can be labeled insufficiently “transparent” or “reproducible,” even when it meets every accepted benchmark of those terms.

The result is Orwellian. A portal famous for democratizing climate data is branded as not “gold standard” science; a White House that has terminated billions in research funding, dismantled scientific offices, and fired many federal scientists claims it is restoring rigor to federal science.

Why this matters beyond one website

Federal climate communication isn’t a luxury; it’s infrastructure. State adaptation plans, insurance risk models, and public health early warning systems all depend on the timely and curated delivery of NOAA data. When the dedicated interface disappears, so does the usability of that information for non-specialists. Throwing the raw files onto a generic FTP server and calling it “access” is like dumping the Library of Congress onto a sidewalk and congratulating yourself on openness.

More broadly, climate.gov is a canary in the coal mine. Already this year, watchdog groups have tallied thousands of federal web pages on climate, environmental justice, LGBTQ+ health, quietly removed or redirected. The EO gives every agency a new justification to continue the purge: if content isn’t “gold-standard,” out it goes.

What real rigor would look like

If the administration were serious about scientific excellence, the guidance would have included:

1. Procedural transparency—clear, public criteria for deeming work non-compliant, with independent review.

2. Due-process protections for federal scientists whose publications are flagged.

3. Stable funding for the people and platforms that deliver science to the public.

4. Explicit recognition that politically motivated suppression is antithetical to rigor.

Instead, we have a slogan now being used to justify erasing one of the government’s most transparent resources.

Where we go from here

• Archive and amplify. Use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to save high-traffic climate.gov pages and share them widely.

• Ask your representatives to demand an investigation into the site’s closure and the implementation of the EO.

• Support independent data stewards. Groups like EDGI are working to host orphaned climate datasets; they need visibility and funding.

• Push for legislative safeguards that enshrine data accessibility standards, independent of executive whims.

The disappearance of climate.gov is not an isolated incident; it is a warning shot. If we allow the language of open science to be twisted into a cudgel, we will lose not only websites but the very principle that publicly funded science belongs to the public. Call it what you like, “rigor,” “integrity,” “gold standard,” but remember that those words mean nothing if the facts they are supposed to protect can be wiped from the web with the stroke of a pen.

They said they wanted rigor. They handed us censorship. And, unfortunately, climate.gov won’t be their last stop.

That’s it for today - Thank you so much for reading SciLight!

If you enjoyed today’s post, please like it or share it with others. You can also support the work we do to shine a light on the politicization of science by becoming a paid subscriber!

If you want to share today’s post as a web page with your network, click this button:

If you have suggestions, questions, comments, or want to drop us a line - send it all to scilightsubstack@gmail.com