Highlights from the Change Log: NOAA removes the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide from its website
Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Highlights from the Change Log” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the language used on, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their significance, as well as understanding of the ephemeral nature of website information. These website changes happened in February 2025 and involve the removal of the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide document and several accompanying pages on the Climate.gov website.
What happened:
Between February 7 and February 11, 2025, the landing page for the 2024 Climate Literacy Guide on Climate.gov became inaccessible. Around this time other webpages about this guide also were removed from Climate.gov. These now either display a “Page Not Found” or “Access Denied” banner. Pages removed include:
- The main page for the guide, titled “Essential Principles for Understanding and Addressing Climate Change,” which contained most of the guide’s content
- The “About the Climate Literacy Guide” page, which contained additional information about the artworks in the guide
In addition to these removals, sometime between February 3 and March 7, the downloadable PDF version of this guide was also removed from the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) website. The URL to the guide’s PDF now directs to an error page with an “Access Denied” message.
Links that led to this guide have been removed from other federal websites, including on the Climate Program Office’s “Climate Resources and Partners” webpage. A link to a webinar recording about the guide was also removed from the USGCRP website, but the webinar recording is still accessible from the USGCRP’s Youtube channel.
Oftentimes, when federal information and webpages such as these are removed, the only place to find them is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine’s web archiving tool. However, Cordelia Norris, a design and education specialist who designed the original guide, has created a copy of the guide and posted it on her website, a process she describes in this social media post.
Why we think it’s interesting:
The 2024 Climate Literacy Guide was a remarkable document developed with input from the public and built on over a decade of Climate Change science and climate communications research. It was developed by the USGCRP for the purpose of helping educate the public on the science behind Climate Change and attempts at mitigation and adaptation. The 2024 version was the third edition of the guide and incorporated topics such as Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Justice. According to the guide, being a climate-literate person involves recognizing “credible information about climate change and [knowing] where to find it.” It is therefore ironic this guide would be removed from federal websites, since this document provided authoritative information on the subject of Climate Change and linked to other substantial sources covering this topic.
This guide was removed around the same time other Climate Change-related information was being removed from federal websites. However, other resources on Climate.gov under the “Teaching Climate” webpage remained intact. The first edition of this guide from 2009 is also still available on the USGCRP website. It is not clear under what specific direction or policy the decision to remove this document was made, but Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” and its termination of Climate Change-related Biden-era executive orders, might have led to this decision.
As the future of several agencies and interagency partnerships, including the USGCRP, are unclear, the removal of this guide may be a harbinger of what is to come. The 2024 Climate Literacy Guide was based on the contents of the fifth National Climate Assessment. While the National Climate Assessment published every four years is congressionally mandated, will there be personnel to produce the Sixth National Climate Assessment? With the current layoffs happening within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and calls for the disintegration of the USGCRP, the future of these types of federal research publications are in doubt.
More details:
Webpages that have been removed:
2024 Climate Literacy Guide, website version: February 7 vs. February 11
About the Climate Literacy Guide page: February 3 vs. March 14
PDF version of the guide: February 3 vs. March 7
Climate Program Office’s “Climate Resources and Partners” webpage that linked to the guide: February 4 vs. March 13
USGCRP Resources page that linked to a USGCRP webinar about the guide: January 13 vs. February 13