
Scientists are copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump - mozumder
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/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_climatedata-1130a:homepage/story&utm_term=.d3a6fefd7265
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lyschoening
Now that Trump's cabinet picks are becoming public, all bets are off. It is
entirely likely that vital U.S. research projects will be shut down at short
notice. I don't think these scientists are being paranoid at all. The data,
while public, is on government funded servers and Trump and his cabinet will
soon have great influence over that government.

People who look at Trump's decision not to build a wall or not to prosecute
Hillary as a sign of moderation are missing the bigger picture. We can expect
a worst case outcome on anything Trump can profit from that can make it
through a Republican congress.

~~~
dekhn
wouldn't shutting down research projects cause large losses of jobs, and
further, cause downstream effects on the suppliers (DOE has a multibillion
dollar budget, there are many companies that provide expensive toys to DOE,
etc etc)? That seems to go against Trump's message about jobs...

~~~
lyschoening
So far Trump has always said what he needed to say to accomplish his goals,
not the other way round. I am sure any government funds that profit him
directly or indirectly will keep flowing, but I don't think we have any reason
to believe that he is motivated by the prospect of keeping jobs.

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nonbel
1) They should have done this long ago anyway.

2) I don't really understand this. If Trump thinks it is a "hoax", why would
he try to delete the evidence of their crime?

3) "One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate
research and instead should focus on space exploration." Good, mission creep
is the main tool used to destroy government agencies.

4) This seems like chicken little behavior. I really doubt anyone is going to
"delete" any data, instead they will stop getting funding to store it, run the
servers, etc. But once again, if he thinks it is a "hoax" he would want more
people to access the data.

~~~
burkaman
It's not "mission creep". The very first objective listed in the National
Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 is "The expansion of human knowledge of
phenomena in the atmosphere and space".

~~~
nonbel
Thanks, you are correct. I did not know that.

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sp332
The Internet Archive would take it, I'm sure. And they're just shoring up
their backup in Canada. [http://archive.org/donate](http://archive.org/donate)
ArchiveTeam has been working on publicly-available data from government
websites as well. They don't seem to have a page on the wiki yet, but here's
the list they're going from
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5ciVztsDMJcZ2SVs1BrfqYCc/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0)

Edit: that's actually a list made up by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, however
AT is grabbing it as well.

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epistasis
It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science
because it conflicts with their ideology. If anybody hasn't heard of
Lysenkoism, it's definitely worth reading about:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism)

~~~
r_smart
Look up Jonathan Haidt's discussion on science denial and political ideology.
It's not just for conservatives / Republicans. Everyone does it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Everyone does it.

Like, say, acting out of internalized ethnic bias, everyone does it, but not
everyone does it _equally_ , and that everyone does it to some extent is no
reason not to call out the KKK (or their anti-science analogs) as a particular
problem.

~~~
r_smart
Anything to get a reference to Hitler or the KKK in, eh?

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hughw
They should make data publicly available and available for replication anyway.
That goes for all data collected on NSF, NIH, and other government funding
sources.

~~~
fusiongyro
As an employee of the NRAO, I can tell you almost everything collected is
publicly available. We do respect a proprietary period of one year, during
which only the principal investigator's team can access the data, but after
that those observations become public.

Our internal storage cluster holds around half a petabyte. If anybody wanted
to, they could certainly mirror it, but since we're talking about radio
astronomy data here it's not likely to be interesting to anybody but a radio
astronomer. You can of course take a CASA tutorial and learn how to reduce
that data yourself!

To the best of my knowledge, this is general policy for the NSF and other NSF-
funded institutions have the same charge. Archive development is a big topic
for all scientific institutions. It's actually a fairly significant part of my
job.

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xname2
OK. So Trump is the coming president, and GW is real and Trump will not handle
it properly. So it is very likely GW bad predictions are going to happen. My
question is: when will we start to see massive sell of beach houses?

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fusiongyro
I think it's overly paranoid, personally, but there's no reason not to have
more backups if possible. Just adding up the few rows in the spreadsheet that
have size estimates, it's going to be at least 0.2 PB. I hope they can find
enough donor to supply the storage.

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relics443
What's to stop these scientists from fudging data to meet their agenda. Then
they can point at the fed and claim they manipulated it.

End of the story is trust no one, make your own backup of the data, and verify
for yourself if anything has changed in the future.

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throw12313221
Is not there a ban on political subjects this week?

Anyway it is quite a funny situation. Some climate scientists had to fight
tooth and nail, to get raw climate data available.

And mirroring online data and media content, has been a best practice in some
communities for several years.

~~~
cypherpunks01
I thought it was last week, and I think it was canceled early as well.

~~~
internaut
Civility has deteriorated since.

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peterwwillis
Remember 8 years ago when Obama was taking office and gun sales shot through
the roof because everyone thought Obama was going to 'take their guns'?

Perhaps the fear here, as was then, is not entirely justified. Just because
something is _possible_ does not make it _probable_. But if it gets people off
their ass and organizing to defend their positions, all the better.

~~~
epistasis
That's a ridiculous comparison. Obama had never made any moves about "taking
guns." Trump has campaigned on climate change being a "hoax" and has
denigrated the science for years. Then before taking office he's already
asking for lists of individuals that generate this data, when there is
absolutely no use for this list other than intimidation.

If Obama had asked for registry of all the gun shops and their owners a month
before taking office after years of calling for taking away guns, then, sure,
go ahead and make the comparison. Otherwise its just a misleading false
equivalency.

~~~
peterwwillis
The comparison is valid because both are examples of people trying to justify
their fears of what may happen because of what they see as a clear intent,
when there is no actual proof of intent.

The fact that a candidate may have asked for lists of client scientists after
calling climate change a hoax, and that from this alone you extrapolate that
he must be aiming to delete their data, is association fallacy.

~~~
epistasis
>what they see as a clear intent, when there is no actual proof of intent.

You have ignored the actual contents of my post.

On one side of this, the "what" is nonexistent or completely fabricated. On
the other side, there are unprecedented and chilling political demands.

The view from 30,000 feet can make dissimilar things look similar, but that
doesn't mean that it's the best view. Details matter.

