"As government websites go dark, some nonprofits are trying to fill the void"
"When news broke that climate.gov was about to go dark in June, Jeffrey Grant scrambled to download as many graphs and data tables from the website as he could. The high school biology teacher had relied heavily on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website to teach students about climate change, showing data on carbon dioxide levels and asking the students to analyze trends and make connections like real climatologists. “Science is always expanding,” says Grant, who works at Downers Grove North High School in Illinois. “So, it is important that I always provide them with the latest research. Otherwise, they just have to take my word for it.”
Grant is not alone. As the school year kicked into gear this fall, educators across the country have been reworking lesson plans and searching for reliable sources of up-to-date scientific information. The climate.gov URL, which was shuttered after President Donald Trump’s administration terminated 10 science communication and data visualization experts who maintained it, now redirects web users to a NOAA web page on climate that contains a fraction of the original information. A NOAA spokesperson says the move was “an effort to centralize and consolidate resources.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has moved to restrict climate change research and education and retreat from U.S. commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Just last week, he told world leaders at the United Nations that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated.” As part of the campaign, officials have deleted climate data sets used by scientists and the public or made them more difficult to reach.
Many science teachers depended on those resources. The Next Generation Science Standards, which were created by a consortium of states and nonprofit organizations to provide guidance on what K-12 students should know, recommend introducing humanmade climate change in fifth grade and weaving it through all science classes. But that may become increasingly difficult if teachers can’t readily find the information they need. “The more time it takes for them to find those things, the less apt they’re going to use it. So that’s discouraging,” Grant says."
Advertisement 
