The Trump administration has shut down innumerable climate programs, including public-facing sources of information.
All is not lost, though, partly because of significant efforts to retrieve that information, and partly because other nonprofit sources of user-friendly data have continued without interference.
Here are some of the best places to find understandable dashboards, maps, and analysis for what can seem like overly complicated information.
Where to find "rescued" climate data
Climate.us
One of the most important government sites shut down by Trump was climate.gov — a NASA-run collection of information written for the general public, not just experts.
Fortunately, a few dedicated individuals have come to the rescue with this substitute site. In her overview of this project at Grist, Kate Yoder writes that the new site “preserves climate dashboards, maps, blogs, and explanatory articles of the earlier site," and its goal is to ‘build an enduring, independent, and scientifically rigorous platform that the world can rely on for climate communication, education, and engagement’.”
Yoder’s title suggests the larger context she also addresses: “The plan to make climate science harder to erase.” For another context, that of gender, see Jenae Barnes’s piece in The 19th, “Trump dismantled a federal climate website. These women rebuilt it.”
“‘Canary in a Coal Mine’: Data Scientists Restore a Climate Justice Tool Taken Down by Trump" by Anika Jane Beamer for Inside Climate News is another good story about the efforts to rescue useful government information, focused on the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.
Beamer covers related efforts as well and offers many useful links, including to the Public Environmental Data Partners list of several such recovery projects, including the new version of the tool.
For a comprehensive list of all the climate-related projects that Trump’s administration has killed, see this site created by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School.
On offer here are three primary tracking tools: the Climate Backtracker, the Inflation Reduction Act Tracker (co-maintained with the Environmental Defense Fund), and the Silencing Science Tracker (co-maintained with the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund).
The Sabin Center also offers a global litigation database, an attribution database, and other resources.
Climate Central
Climate Central is a major source of user-friendly data visualizations, and its homepage is a gateway to numerous data collections and visualizations. (This nonprofit is an “independent group of scientists and communicators who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s lives.”)
- To see how the climate has changed in your city (or one near you), see the Climate Shift Index.
- To see that same information in visually compelling colored stripes, see the Warming Stripes database. You can read about the annual “Show Your Stripes Day” on June 20 here. Knitters and other fiber artists may already know about the related Tempestry Project.
- Other Climate Central resources address sea level rise, fire weather days, and billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. The disaster page is another recovery story, as this piece by Sophie Hurwitz in Grist explains: “Trump killed a crucial disaster database. This nonprofit just saved it.”
Reuters Climate Monitor
The Reuters Climate Monitor compares today’s temperatures to historic averages — in particular places, over continents and around the globe — and in several different ways: plain numbers, simple graphs, and a searchable map with temperature colors.
Updated daily, it covers a truly impressive range of locations, including not just cities but also national parks, small towns, and even roads.
Our World In Data: Climate Change
Among the many topics addressed by this nonprofit organization is climate, and its data offerings are rich, with somewhat technical information rendered in understandable graphics.
Pages focus not only on climate change itself but also on related topics such as CO2 and greenhouse gases, energy, wildfires, air pollution, environmental impacts of food, and natural disasters.
Mapping The Unmapped
Subtitle: “Can a crowdsourced map of the world help save millions of people from climate disaster?”
Unlike the other sources noted in this collection, this piece in Grist by Maddy Crowell tells the fascinating story about the difficult creation of a data source — in the form of mapping places that have been too remote, poor, or lightly inhabited for entities like Google Earth to cover but where, nevertheless, disaster relief may be sorely needed.
The volunteer mapping is coordinated by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and their platform is OpenStreetMap.
Project Cosmos
Just launched by Carbon Brief, this enormous database is intended primarily for an academic audience, but the visualization itself is interesting even for non-researchers.
Rendered “as an interactive ‘cosmos’ — a vast network graph in which each publication appears as a ‘star’ — the database reveals how different fields of climate research relate to and build upon one another.”
This graph looks like a multicolored exploding universe, with the details of color, size, and spacing representing the academic field of the authors and the number of times the publication is cited by other scholars or the network of specialists who read each other’s work.
Including over 1.8 million publications that are linked by citations, it “represents the most complete and expansive mapping of human knowledge on climate change ever assembled, tracking more than a century of academic research.”
As the home page explains, the various kinds of studies (medicine, psychology, biology, physics, and many more) can be seen in this network graph.
This article was originally published by Yale Climate Connections.
Featured Image: Goddard/Rebecca Roth/Courtesy of NASA
