With climate change data disappearing, former NOAA scientists strike back

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- The Elkhart River in Goshen resembles a serene stream these days, thanks to michiana's drought.

It's a far cry from seven years ago, when the worst flooding in Goshen's history devastated the maple city. Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley is Goshen's director of environmental resilience. He said just months after the unfathomable flooding in 2018, Purdue University released the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment.

That report cautioned that this kind of natural disaster could keep happening.

"What it was projecting was the role of climate change in driving increased precipitation events going forward," Sawatsky-Kingsley explained, "and so and so we began to work at a flood resilience plan with those projections in mind."

The city is currently using those climate change projections to craft a flood emergency plan, but what if the data used to develop Goshen's flood plan disappeared, or wasn't available to decision makers, like those in Goshen?

"To not have access to that information would be a handicap, for sure," Sawatsky-Kingsley said.

Rebecca Lindsey is the former editor of climate.gov, a website founded in 2010 that used to be run by NOAA scientists. They populated the site with resources and education on climate change and its impacts.

She told ABC57News that there was a seismic shift in June. All of the content makers of the website were fired, and an executive order directed climate.gov to redirect back to NOAA's website.

"Essentially, it's like redirecting the visitors who are coming to a store into a closet," Lindsey explained.

The change, at first, might seem like a minor detail. But according to Lindsey, this small tweak took editorial control out of scientists' hands and transferred it into the political sphere, and the effects are noticeable.

Many links referencing climate change, abc57news was able to find either lead to a broken link or redirect you back to the NOAA climate homepage.

"That [executive order] really made us nervous about what the administration's plans were," Lindsey recalled.

"They might use climate.gov to spread misinformation about climate science."

Lindsey and other former members of climate.gov sprung into action, setting up climate.us she describes this as a non-profit successor of climate.gov, with many of the same features of the old site and says it's a chance to protect climate change data from political interference.

The biggest success so far for the climate. us is providing a home for the fifth national climate assessment, which Lindsey said the trump administration took offline.

However, getting this new website back to its old self...will take time.

"It will probably take us four to six months to build out a new version and then get the content migrated into it," Lindsey estimated.

Lindsey also said they've been inundated with hundreds of emails of encouragement since this process started.

While some messages are from people passionate about climate science, others care about censorship.

"Some people say the decision to try to hide or alter climate science information for a political purpose, they think that's wrong," Lindsey recalled. "And so, we're getting supporters who just say, you know, 'this is about free speech.'"

No matter what side of the aisle you fall on, Lindsey says she falls on the side of science

"climate.gov was never political," Lindsey said. "All we were trying to do is tell people what scientists say is likely to happen, what our country decides to do in response to that information that is going to depend on other things."

I asked the director and the acting deputy director of communications for NOAA for a comment on this story and a response to Rebecca Lindsey's claims.

They both sent me emails saying they cannot respond to requests that are not "mission critical" due to the government shutdown.