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Mirroring US climate data

climatemirror.org

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Re: Mirroring US climate data

#31

Post by 2bitencryption »

danbruc wrote: post #26
crispinb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only create redundancy when you are sure it's necessary, you're too late.

Of course and I think having those mirrors is a good thing, stuff disappears from the internet all the time. But that is not the question I am asking. We could have started mirroring climate data and all kinds of other data last year or five years ago, there is always a risk of losing data. But this has obviously been triggered by the Trump presidency and is focused on climate data which implies that people are now m…

Probably not a realistic concern.

But.

Lots of things seem to be in motion now that many people said could never possibly happen. An actual executive order on building a wall on the US/Mexico border. Government agencies unconventionally being silenced -- even if a presidential gag order on government agencies makes sense and should be allowed in certain conditions, these present conditions are nothing if not hostile.

So it seems like this administration is proving that it doesn't care about convention, or if it comes off as aggressive and hostile towards the ideals it objects to.

So... still probably not a justified fear, but we're closer to a reality where it is justifiable than we ever thought possible.

Re: Mirroring US climate data

#33

Post by danbruc »

danbruc wrote: post #11

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.…

Why was this comment by ajmurmann flagged? Up to now that seems the best evidence provided for answering my question even though I think it is relatively weak evidence and it lacks a source for the second paragraph.

Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/....

They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...

Re: Mirroring US climate data

#34

Post by beatpanda »

danbruc wrote: post #11

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.…

"Lessons learned under former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who was accused of muzzling scientists during his term, initially energized a "race" to save the U.S. government's climate data. Activists also studied policy papers by members of Trump's transition team to get a sense of what might be at risk.

But what they have witnessed so far has been "unprecedented," Murphy said, and "much more intense and publicly celebrated" than the precedent set in Canada.

"The transition team and Trump administration are very upfront and promoting of this plan; it's not that this is surreptitious," Murphy said."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspe...

Re: Mirroring US climate data

#35

Post by JamisonM »

paradite wrote: post #27
danbruc wrote: post #11

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.…

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.

If some large number of those peer-reviewed journal articles' conclusions are (or appear to be) undermined by future discoveries having the raw data to confirm or refute such a development taking into consideration assumptions about the data that might have since changed or been proven incorrect seems like a pretty important thing.

What is in your high school geography notes was dictated in part by political decisions about school curriculum - you cannot assume that the future of even high school geography notes will match your experience.

Re: Mirroring US climate data

#37

Post by 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

Ftp-gov-grab: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ftp-gov-grab

Join us on IRC: #cheetoflee on freenode

Re: Mirroring US climate data

#38

Post by 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".
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