
Mirroring US climate data - pirocks
http://www.climatemirror.org/
======
jszymborski
If you want to help towards archiving climate data and other gov't public
datasets, join the ArchiveTeam effort. All you need is to run their ftp-gov-
grab script and a bit of bandwidth. VPSs work very well for this sort of
thing, so if you have a box lying around, just run the script.

More info at the wiki: [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Ftp-
gov](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Ftp-gov)

Ftp-gov-grab: [https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ftp-gov-
grab](https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ftp-gov-grab)

Join us on IRC: #cheetoflee on freenode

~~~
kpcyrd
Correction: it seems to be #cheetoflee on efnet.org

~~~
jszymborski
oops, thanks for that.

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fsttx
Another useful tactic is to archive news and commentary (left and right) about
current political events, both for accountability and perhaps, to prevent the
rewriting of history in the era of "alternative facts".

~~~
angry_octet
It is not sufficient to have a record of facts when others have alternative
facts. To your signed record of facts they would just introduce alternate
facts with alternative signatures and claim you had made it up. Normal people
don't have the tools or experience to differentiate, and the alternative facts
support a story they want to believe, rather than hard truths.

News media won't even mention your so-called 'real facts', facebook and
twitter might not let others see them. Before you know it you'll be denounced
by your neighbours, work colleagues and friends as a traitor, a madman. You'll
lose your job, or your partner will. There may be a show trial and public
denunciation. This has all happened before: the USSR, McCarthy.

If you don't want that you need an alternate means of distributing real facts,
and countering fake ones. It has to be hosted so deeply in our tech
infrastructure that it can't be firewalled or jammed. It needs to be
accessible covertly. And it needs to record all the alternative facts too,
because they like to change their facts.

Let's call it Samizdat.

~~~
wybiral
The US government can't make all of the real scientists out there just
disappear. Climate models have an impact on many different fields of research
and unless there's a total shutdown of science (which seems absurd) those
people and facts will still be there.

There's a portion of the population who's wanted to deny climate change for a
long time and I believe they'll accept the alt-facts to justify their
position. But I'm skeptical about the efficacy of successfully silencing
existing news groups and the majority of scientists.

Has anything like that ever been successful in the connected world? That being
said, we do absolutely need to make protect our internet from censorship.

~~~
sandworm101
Go look at any list of recently-cancelled television shows. You will be
shocked at the number of them that you liked, but have now slipped from your
mind. Public memory is fickle and it is very possible to remove even
widespread facts.

Example: a few years back a uk submarine was stuck high aground. As the tide
went out the prop was exposed. I and a billion other people saw it live on bbc
news. (Blue poly fins, at least 10 inside a housing). Good luck trying to find
that image now. It has been sucessfully removed. The internet isnt the great
memory well we all want it to be. With effort, facts can be changed, events
scrubbed.

~~~
wybiral
> Go look at any list of recently-cancelled television shows. You will be
> shocked at the number of them that you liked, but have now slipped from your
> mind. Public memory is fickle and it is very possible to remove even
> widespread facts.

Change and censorship aren't synonymous and I have no expectation that
anything will last forever. But it's easier to ignore and forget about
something like a television show than something like global climate change.

My post was in relation to the mass censorship required to create a world like
the parent post described.

As for your submarine, that's interesting. Was it this one?
[http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-
islands-116053...](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-
islands-11605365) I'm not doubting the ability to censor things, especially
before they become widespread, but climate change will be much harder because
it's already a part of our vocabulary.

~~~
sandworm101
Id say that mass-censorship isnt the goal. You only have to keep a small
mumber of influential americans distracted. That group (the perhaps 25% who
have both a vote and money/time to donate), they dictate national policy.
Everyone else can scream all they want to no end. The internet allows for such
focused censorship.

~~~
facetube
Even fewer if you have a gerrymandered election system. Steve Bannon, now
senior advisor to Trump, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica, a company
that built (and presumably enabled the exploitation of) psychological profiles
to maximize shares/distribution of content on social media, targeting specific
geographic clusters:

1: [http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-
cruncher...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-crunchers-
who-say-they-helped-donald-trump-to-win/)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica)

3: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-
de...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-
truth-internet-search-facebook)

The Trump campaign paid this group millions of dollars beginning in the summer
of 2016.

------
hunterwerlla
In torrent form: [http://climatetorrent.com/](http://climatetorrent.com/)
Torrents are a great way of maintaining data integrity and allowing future
sharing easily.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
Thanks, is this yours? It would be great if the homepage displayed a short
description of the different torrents/datasets, their sizes/contents, and the
number of seeders for each. That would greatly help me decide which one(s) to
prioritize helping out with, as I don't have resources to keep a copy of it
all.

~~~
hunterwerlla
I don't know who is behind this, I just saw it on /r/DataHoarder

------
trothamel
Can I be the first to claim that the people running the mirror are changing
the data for their own nefarious purposes?

Not that I believe this or anything, but come on - you know that accusation is
going to go around. It might make sense to use a remote server to timestamp
files as they're uploaded, or something like that.

~~~
nirav72
When there is a broad consensus across the scientific community about climate
change, does it even matter at this point if the data has been changed? The
U.S isn't the only country that collects this data. So even if changed, it
doesn't matter.

~~~
pdonis
_> When there is a broad consensus across the scientific community about
climate change, does it even matter at this point if the data has been
changed?_

It does if the data that was changed is the data that was used to support the
consensus.

More generally, _all_ data collected by research that is funded by taxpayers
should be collected, cryptographically signed and verified, and archived where
any taxpayer can see it. I have never understood why that is not already
standard operating procedure.

~~~
tracker1
Usually around IP incentives as part of the grant, in order to further entice
applicants. This is taken further by pressure from educational institutions
and their researchers to file for patents against said research.

I'm not saying it's right, and agree with you. But often there's a lot of
entropy with the status quo, and to the seated incumbents in a space.

~~~
tukelully
Does this carry over to federal agencies as well? I know the state of access
to journals and papers published by universities is a shitshow but don't know
how it is at the government level.

~~~
tracker1
A lot of government research is completed by universities and private
companies under grant programs.

------
danbruc
Having backups is obviously always a good idea but that aside, how likely is
it, that mirroring this data is actually necessary? There are obviously at
least some people believing that it is necessary but then there are always
people convinced that the most silly things are necessary. I am really unable
to tell whether this is more of an overreaction or an urgent necessity,
especially as someone not living in the US. Is the future just [perceived as]
so unpredictable, that better safe than sorry is the right mindset?

~~~
paradite
I'd like to discuss a slightly different issue here.

Aren't there already a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles on the issue
of climate change? Why is it still necessary to store the presumably raw data?

Even my high school geography notes have an abundance of information on the
issue of climate change (for and against). So I doubt if this is necessary at
all.

~~~
dagss
That is a bit like asking what you need source code for after having compiled
the binary program.

Just like you have new versions of a program building on changes to source
code, you can run newer and improved analysis on the scientific data (whether
to see if you get the same result, a new additional insight or whatever).

Journal papers are often no better than having the binary (or perhaps more
accurately the stdout dump of running the binary...)

~~~
paradite
Ah. Never thought of it that way, makes perfect sense. Thanks for the analogy.

------
beams_of_light
I'm sincerely dismayed that this is necessary.

~~~
general_ai
It's not.

~~~
chordatum
Not _yet_.

~~~
general_ai
Not ever. There's no plausible scenario that I can see under which this data
might be irrecoverably lost.

------
olivierlacan
Feels like the most important things people with some spare cash can do to
help this project is help them raise money to host the mirrored climate
science data on online.net: [https://www.generosity.com/volunteer-
fundraising/climate-mir...](https://www.generosity.com/volunteer-
fundraising/climate-mirror-back-up-climate-data)

------
Tempest1981
I heard that Trump has given NOAA 100 days to justify their existence, or face
heavy cuts. Does anyone know the details?

Here is the closest article I could find:
[http://www.salon.com/2016/11/23/politicizing-climate-
change-...](http://www.salon.com/2016/11/23/politicizing-climate-change-
donald-trumps-budget-could-cut-climate-funding-for-nasa-other-federal-
departments/)

~~~
ams6110
Why shouldn't government agencies have to justify their budgets and operations
periodically?

~~~
epistasis
How about when they submit a budget, rather than as a focused witch hunt?

Of course, its not like this political atmosphere would listen to any budget
justifications. It's all theater now, it doesn't matter what actual
justifications there are, what actual facts there are, or what things actually
look like when you spend the time to dive into them. What matters these days
is a small number of opinion-makers feel in their hearts, and what they tell
their followers to feel with quick one-sentence justifications.

------
hackuser
> We are working to set up a secure and completely anonymous file deposit
> system for the future.

Provide a mailing address to which to send hard drives.

~~~
sandebert
Good idea, I posted it to their web form.

------
po
Awesome. Is there the same thing but for all public datasets? I saw recently
someone showed a federal site had put up a (hastily hacked in) link to
download all data on the day of the inauguration. I bet there are a lot of
federal employees who would like a well-resourced site to upload to.

------
nandhp
Is this project collaborating with Archive Team? They have quite a lot of
experience with this sort of scraping+archiving project (e.g. Geocities,
Google Reader, Coursera, etc.).

[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

------
hackuser
It's great to see their efforts. What are you doing? What am I doing? Reading
about it isn't nearly enough.

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XorNot
It would be a good use of IPFS to mirror this data into that network.

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mynewtb
This would be perfect for IPFS I think.

------
cema
As much as I maintain a skeptical attitude to all sides of this scientific
(and political) issue, I absolutely support the effort to keep the data
available to the public. Science cannot move forward without the data (and
metadata) available for everyone. Even more generally, society would suffer if
it is not available.

(When I say "metadata", I refer to the data sources, methods of the data
acquisition and so on. When a scientific field is politicised it is not only
hard to trust the models but even the data, so I think the metadata are very
important, if they are available.)

------
fenollp
Alternative facts will push us to find a way to discontinue them.

What is left to do to have truly open computation? * somewhat-to completely
free computational power?: CircleCI, Travis CI, whatever * open source
repositories to run code from?: Github hooks and others * trusting trust? *
open hardware? * decentralized websites?

------
philippnagel
Might be a use case for [https://datproject.org](https://datproject.org).

~~~
neuromantik8086
Or git-annex / git LFS.

------
gglitch
Is there a publicly-available blockchain specifically for checksums of
journalism and research?

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dyukqu
Slightly off-topic, but my guess is that the next 4 years will be the _golden
age_ of privacy (in general), file-sharing and maybe even distributed web &
federated services - for the US _at least_.

~~~
gramstrong
Do you mean the golden age of private infrastructure, or the golden age of
folks combatting a non-private infrastructure? Because from my point of view,
privacy in the US is only going to continue to get worse (and that's not even
necessarily a dig at the current administration).

~~~
dyukqu
What I mean is (I guess) people will be seriously considering their privacy -
especially online/digital one.

~~~
stevehawk
Yup. I already formatted/reinstalled everything.. beefed up the encryption
usage.. pretty much changed to a whitelist of domains on my tomato router and
got me some OTP/U2F devices.. need to switch to Tor for browsing though.. and
what else would people recommend?

------
cool_look
So now we have complete polarisation.

Left leaning people will not accept any science generated under a Right
leaning government

and as we already know Right leaning people find it hard to trust the science
coming from a Left leaning government.

~~~
fisherjeff
Eh, no. This isn't about not accepting scientific output under a Republican
president – science was well received under Bush, as I recall, and will
continue to be under Trump.

This is about the fear of _losing_ scientific data that has already been
produced.

~~~
cool_look
On the surface it is about preventing deletion.

But the subtext is that any 'discoveries' or 'corrections' will be rejected
out of hand.

The prime ones being the recent corrections to the land temperature record
that cooled the 1930s and 1940s and heated 2009 onwards yielding a steady
linear increase graphic.

When those corrections are placed under the microscope and likely reversed,
what will the reaction be ? Scientific shills of the Republicans are making up
Alternative Facts... here is our precious archived dataset that true believers
can reference.

~~~
nikdaheratik
No, this is complete FUD, and disingenuous at best. What people who care are
worried about is a repeat of what happened in Canada under the Harper
government where the data was simply not available at all.

[edit] the difference is that it's not the administration or even the EPA that
is putting it's reputation on the line if the data was manipulated, but the
individual scientists themselves. No one with any sense believes that a
scientist is going to fall on their sword and ruin their career just to make
up some BS talking point that Trump can run with.

------
godshatter
Although NoScript and uBlock Origin show nothing being blocked, I still end up
with a blank page when trying to view this site. Maybe it's a Pale Moon thing.

~~~
intrasight
Me too

------
angelohuang
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think this whole notion of an AntiScience
threat due to the new administration is a bit sensationalized.

------
notsrg
Surprised there's no comment here regarding the claim that using Dropbox is
anonymous...

