Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

19thnews.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 227 posts

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#41

Post by estearum »

cheschire wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not accurate?

They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.

> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.

Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.

They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.

Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#42

Post by mempko »

cheschire wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not accurate?

They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.

Quick question, what is your mental model of the climate?

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#43

Post by alphawhisky »

9dev wrote: post #10
nickff wrote: post #4

This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient? To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions ca…

This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.

You misspelled "self-corruption"

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#44

Post by throwaway_7274 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #26
bestouff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.

Private companies don’t care about having accurate data? Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?

They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#45

Post by dnautics »

dnautics wrote: post #17
turtlebits wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?

do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)

update: it turns out the parent org hasn't set up donations for this sub org, so i donated to climate action instead (also under the parent org)

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#46

Post by hvb2 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #20
nickff wrote: post #4

This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient? To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions ca…

Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing. If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution. Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...

This is the American way.

The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.

No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#47

Post by justin66 »

cheschire wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not accurate?

They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.

[flagged]

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#48

Post by imoverclocked »

sampli wrote: post #8
nickff wrote: post #4

This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient? To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions ca…

The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?

> stations in remote places all over the country

s/country/world/

There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#49

Post by dnautics »

cogman10 wrote: post #40
dnautics wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)

Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars. Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome. We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage d…

is there like a list of things that government is responsible for, or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?

> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.

it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)

Re: Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources

#50

Post by bborud »

cheschire wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not accurate?

They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.

You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.

This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.

Post reply on HN