Jeb Bladine: Scientists restore access to climate data

Decades ago, a NASA scientist told a U.S. Senate committee that human-caused “global warming” had begun, launching a wave of forums, programs and civic discussions focused on future risks. I joined meetings of a Portland group, which today seems like just a small remnant of history.

However, people are still concerned, and those fears are growing in the face of federal government disavowal of climate change threats.

The issue evolved from future peril to current policy fights; it shifted from global warming to “climate change”; it became more partisan, more institutionalized, and emotionally exhausting. People tuned out, but they haven’t forgotten.

A Gallup Poll this year reported that 44% of U.S. adults worry a great deal about global warming or climate change; another 22% fear “a fair amount.” Those are near-high percentages for Gallop Polls since 1989, while a near-low 32% think the effects of climate change are exaggerated.

Related evidence plays out daily on newscasts as “extreme weather events” unfold. (The World Meteorological Organization defines them as weather that is “rare at a particular place and time of year” with unusual magnitude, timing, location or extent.)

The extremes keep happening: droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, hurricanes and typhoons, tornadoes, blizzards, wildfires driven by weather, extreme precipitation and major floods.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) counts events that cause at least $1 billion in damages (inflation adjusted). There were 430 such events in the United States from 1980 to 2024, an average of 9 per year. The 2020-2024 average was 23 per year.

The World Meteorological Organization, in 2024 alone, found 151 extreme weather events worldwide that were unprecedented in their regions.

In 2026, the U.S. and other nations are on pace to match or exceed recent years of extreme weather. Winter freezes led to a spring of tornadoes, high winds, heavy flooding, record wildfires and extreme heat domes.

The time is ripe for extended scientific vigilance. But instead, in 2025-26, our federal government removed or shut down major climate information resources associated with NOAA and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

Hundreds of scientists and climate research staff were dismissed. The USGCRP website, GlobalChange.gov, was taken offline last July, and the entire Climate.gov staff was eliminated.

Former NOAA employees stepped into the breach to create an independent replacement — Climate.us — saying, “Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change.” That website was launched on June 23.

Thus far, they have preserved federal scientific information and public access thereto. It remains to see whether this new nonprofit stewardship can replicate and expand the government’s long record of forward-looking collection and analysis of climate-related data.

Our federal government, seeking American energy dominance, wanted to weaken the information infrastructure supporting regulation, litigation and clean-energy policies. They wanted to bury lessons from the 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Future history, perhaps, will exalt the work of dismissed federal scientists and others who came together to maintain public access to the data and realities of climate change.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at 503-687-1223 or jbladine@newsregister.com.