
Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data - ComteDeLaFere
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/13/scientists-are-frantically-copying-u-s-climate-data-fearing-it-might-vanish-under-trump/
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sp332
Dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168971)

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roryisok
I recall a post just a few days ago about quitting the news, and how the media
focuses on fear. There's no indication that the trump administration is going
to do anything to climate data other than ignore it. They even say so in this
article.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Really good quote from TFA regarding their motive:

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems
potentially realistic, _or at least something you’d want to hedge against_ ,”
said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California
at Davis.

[ _emphasis mine_ ]

They're hedging against an extreme tail risk. Basically this is the same as
why people buy life insurance. It's highly unlikely that you'll die before you
turn 60, but if you do the consequences for your family would be huge, thus it
makes sense to insure against that scenario.

Same goes here, even an extremely remote threat to irreplacable data is a
reasonable thing to guard against.

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xbmcuser
With the new appointees asking for information about who attended global
warming and carbon conferences. The destruction of previous data is a huge
possiblity we are talking about Bible thumping evoultio and global warming
deniers. And many of these guys are in the pockets of oil in one way or
another

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glenra
Hey, remember when info relating to government-held climate records was a big
secret and instead of frantically plotting to _release_ the data the same
people were frantically plotting to _evade FOIA requests_ for it, on the
grounds that if all the raw data and algorithms got out it might be _misused_
to cast doubt on scientific conclusions?

(eg: [http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/252543/cei-
files-b...](http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/252543/cei-files-brief-
seeking-nasa-records-chris-horner) )

This seems like a massive improvement - fear of Trump has created a huge win
for independent public access to US climate info, and he hasn't even taken
office yet. Hurray for replicability! :-)

~~~
scarmig
This is an incredibly cynical and deceptive comment, as the FOIA request has
nothing to do with getting climate data (which has always been public--that's
how scientists are copying it to non-government controlled servers) and was
instead a fishing attempt to try to find something embarrassing in a
scientist's emails.

Of course, AGW denialists have to rely on deception to make any headway, so
it's par for course.

~~~
glenra
> _climate data (which has always been public.._

It has not _always_ been public. Most of it is _now_ public, but there was a
period (mostly before "Climategate") in which the relevant info absolutely
most definitely was _not_ public. There were _reasons_ given why it was not
public, but not-public it remained, and FOIA efforts (though not so much this
particular one) _did_ finally shake it loose.

[This is all from memory so I'm sure some of it is wrong, but If I Recall
Correctly...]

This is practically ancient history now, but prior to the 1990s some of the
best raw temperature data was collected and assembled and considered _owned_
by individual national bureaucracies some of whom were sensitive about sharing
it - they wanted to stay in the loop about how "their" data was used. To add
all those national records together and make a worldwide temperature record,
it was necessary to talk to all these bureaucrats and assuage their concerns.
Thus, NASA and Hadley CRU apparently collected _some_ of this info under legal
agreements that said they wouldn't just let the rest of the world have the
data.

So when NASA made GISS and Hadley made HADCRUT, they took the raw data,
applied various corrective factors internally, and released a composite
already-corrected data product. The outside world could see the adjusted
climate data but could NOT view the "raw" data and QA it themselves or apply
corrections and QA the effect of the corrections themselves.

This lack of transparency was a problem because periodically NASA would decide
they should fix some problem, tweak the algorithm, and release a new
temperature chart that had CHANGED, and there was no way for outside
scientists to verify what they'd done and that they'd done it correctly - it
was a black box.

Once the IPCC really got rolling and climate started to seem like A Big Deal,
people like Steve McIntyre (at ClimateAudit) wanted to sanity-check what NASA
and CRU were doing. They wanted to look at the raw, uncorrected data and at
the algorithms used to clean it up. So they filed FOIA requests to ask for
this data.

But (according to NASA at the time) the raw data was in a legal limbo - they
had collected some of it under do-not-redistribute agreements. You couldn't
release the WHOLE data set because it's divisible into parts that are
restricted. No problem, says the ClimateAudit crowd, we'll just file separate
requests - one per country - so you can give us the bits of data you CAN
legally release and we'll work around the problem. Clever, right?

But (it now appears) nobody had carefully kept track of WHICH countries' data
was restricted in that way. So it couldn't be done. The upshot was that our
fine national scientists couldn't release ANY of the raw data without somebody
first going back to ALL the national governments and getting their permission
to do so.

Which was eventually (finally) done. And now the stuff is mostly aboveboard.

Alas, a lot of the "skeptic" attitude was generated during the keeping-lots-
of-secrets era. There was a popular attitude that if scientists are _hiding
something_ it must be because they're doing something _nefarious_. Me, on the
other hand, I tend to ascribe most of the secretiveness of that era to greed,
incompetence, and embarrassment more than malice.

The "greed" part of it is that if you call up, say, Nigeria, and ask for a
plot of their temperature record for the last year, there is some specific
person whose _job_ it was to massage that data and do stuff with it using some
ancient computer and if he let the data go then some bright 14-year-old could
do the same stuff on a cheap linux machine, rendering the bureaucrat's job
obsolete. There were people who justified their budget on the basis of "we
publish this Very Important Time Series" \- it might not be the most important
thing they do but it's the most VISIBLE thing they do - where publishing that
time series was once really hard but by the 1990s is something any kid with a
shell script could do in a half hour for free if data and algorithms were
fully available.

The "embarrassment/incompetence" part of it is that if any of these scientists
made some dumb mistake - maybe accidentally overwrote some of the data or had
a bug in their corrections - making everything public could reveal this. So it
has a possible downside and no obvious upside.

(Some climate data is _still_ being kept private for these kinds of reasons,
but mostly not by governments anymore. The main problematic category that
still exists is data held by individual researchers. People who collect stuff
like tree rings or sediment cores _still_ will publish papers based on data
they've never publicly archived - they do this because the data has value to
them - they can publish more papers themselves or demand credit on other
people's papers without fear of getting scooped. Most journals now require
archiving data as a condition of publication but this requirement is widely
ignored, delayed, or only minimally abided by.)

------
Florin_Andrei
Fahrenheit 451

