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US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change (cnn.com) 534

Long-time Slashdot reader ClickOnThis quotes CNN: Some scientists and academics are embarking on a frenzied mission to archive reams of scientific data on climate change, energized by a concern that a Trump administration could seek to wipe government websites of hard-earned research... The chief concern: publicly available climate change data and research found on government websites would be wiped clean or made otherwise inaccessible to the public. Some worry the information could only be retrieved with a taxing Freedom of Information Act request.
One associate professor at the University of Texas tells CNN, "There is a very short window for when the new administration will come in and that's why there's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of information to save."
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US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change

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  • by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @10:38AM (#53507831) Journal
    Hillary wasn't elected, what's the worry?
    • by Anonymous Coward

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the primary!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the election!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the rebelling electoral college!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump is impeached!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump loses the election!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump fails to build the Mars base!

      It's going to be so hilarious when Trump fails to obtain the secrets of immortality!

      Nerr-gak 'zi8ggit zeitgoid Trump s22wellik h-g

    • I think they need two build an ark before the great flood comes..

    • Re:Wiping servers? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by golodh ( 893453 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @03:08PM (#53509291)
      We know. Hillary wasn't elected, Trump was.

      And he really doesn't like it when the evidence contradicts him. Especially not when it reflects on the (in)advisability of his policies.

      He might not personally order a wipe, but with a view to running the country as a business, he has appointed some "climate sceptics" who could very well appoint like-minded trustees to actively realign publicly funded research efforts with national priorities, restructure research departments with a view to national needs, and focus monetary and computing resources in accordance with those needs and priorities.

      Translation: he has appointed a few idiots who in turn might appoint a posse of yahoos who see it as their mission in life to vanish anything or anyone the boss doesn't like and hide the evidence. As in: fire anyone who openly says global warming is a fact, have their funding cut, their computing resources confiscated, and their data wiped. That's what "running the country like a business" means, you know.

      Given that perspective ... why not extend and enhance current backup policies to guarantee continuity of valuable research data with an eye towards potential refocusing of research priorities and allocation of means.

      Tanslation: why not save an offshore copy of your work while you still can?

      Ordinary precaution I'd say.

  • All they need to do is make a deal with archive.org to take the materials off their hands in a deal which doesn't involve a robots.txt file, as a special collection. This is precisely what the internet archive is for...

    • by arielCo ( 995647 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:28AM (#53508047)

      Also, it's a fine time to put our money where our mouths are, as donations are being matched (presumably out of the same concern [archive.org]):

      Dear Internet Archive Patrons:
      You’ve come to the Internet Archive in search of knowledge, to find Web pages you would have lost. Now we need your help in return. Will you help sustain this non-profit library built on trust? We have a huge mission: to give everyone access to all knowledge, forever. For free. The Internet Archive has only 150 staff but runs the #250 website in the world. Your privacy is very important to us, so we don’t collect your personal information. We don’t accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers, staff and rent. That’s where you can help us. Right now a generous supporter will match your donation 1-for-1. So you can double your impact! If you find our site useful, please give what you can today. Thank you.

      Guess I'm chipping in again...

      http://archive.org/ [archive.org]

    • Now's a great time to point out that the Internet Archive themselves are so afraid of what Trump is going to do, that they're currently collecting funds for setting up a mirror outside the US.

      May you live in interesting times, indeed.

  • Motivations aside, remember when the climate skeptics said, "Make the raw data public so we can analyze it!" and actual government agencies, supposedly working for the public were like, "nooooooooooo. You wouldn't understand it the right way, so we can't do that! We only show it to certain people that we've pre-vetted to ensure that they think like us. We'll release these summarized graphs that prove our point!"

    Yeah, ignore the fact that the whole of science actually works when people share their ideas an

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:12AM (#53507963)
      there's tons of raw data out there. I see folks on /. periodically doing their armchair analysis of some of it. And anyway, if they were just holding on to the data because they were nefarious scientists (probably just sucking on that sweet sweet grant money) than why would they care if it got preserved? If they were never going to give it up anyway what difference does it make if it's saved?

      See, this is one of those things I always thought was funny. You've got a bunch of folks with PHds, usually with a heavy emphasis on math and statistics, but the implication I get again and again from folks is that they're somehow trying to cheat us all for the mountains of grant money.

      These folks are in ridiculously high demand in the private sector. They command salaries 2-3x the public sector at the drop of a hat (and if they go to Wallstreet 5-10x). I'm not saying there won't be the occasional bad apple or just plain wrong person, but really, if they were out for personal gain they have much, much better alternatives and they're smart enough to know what they are.
      • there's tons of raw data out there

        Exactly - people in generl have little idea just how much we are talking about. All scientific activity produces mountains of data - it isn't just the LHC at CERN (which produces 100s of GB per second) - even a small study of sea-birds, with the use of small strap-on cameras and similar, can produce TBs in a relatively short span of time. For climate data, it has to be enormous amounts of data too: several daily observations from perhaps millions of weather stations, plus satelite data, radar observations,

        • I've heard a similar story, but not of source code. The account I've heard passed down was of an inexperienced employee who, while teletyped in to a remote mainframe, mistyped a single character when executing a program: Rather than outputting to magnetic tape, he set it to output to an automated card punch machine. The truck, and the bill, arrived some days later.

      • These folks are in ridiculously high demand in the private sector.

        Those who can, do. Those who can't scrabble for tenure.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:50AM (#53508159)

      NASA's raw data on global temperature and the GISTEMP code they use to analyze it are all openly available online. NOAA's climate data is openly available and there are good R packages to make it easy to download. NCDC's climate data archives for the US and for the whole world are freely available online. NASA's satellite climate data is all available on line. Paleoclimate data from ice cores is all on line. NOAA measurements of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases is all on line. All the code for NCAR's community climate model and NASA's GISS Model E are available on line. Other integrated assessment models, such as GCAM are open-source.

      I have been teaching climate change for years, and I have found it very easy to write scripts in R and Python to automatically download the raw climate data from various public government repositories (NASA, NOAA, NCDC, ORNL, etc.), and process it to produce up-to-date figures for my lectures. It's really easy to do.

      So what data do you think the government is not making openly available to the public?

  • Fake News (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tomhath ( 637240 )

    The chief concern: publicly available climate change data and research found on government websites would be wiped clean or made otherwise inaccessible to the public.

    There is no reason to believe this will happen. It's FUD, fake news, whatever you prefer to call it.

    • by Xyrus ( 755017 )

      You mean like how it didn't happen in Australia or Canada?

      When the incoming administrations starts issuing demands for the equivalent of a Jew List for climate and environmental scientists, are planning to gut earth science funding, appointing heads who have vendettas against all things climate and environment, etc. you have to be pretty fucking stupid not to see what the end goal is.

      We've seen this shit before. We know exactly where it's going. That's why scientists are taking steps to make sure the data i

    • by Kohath ( 38547 )

      It's certainly not news. News is when something happens and you tell people, not when some excitable, self-involved people imagine something might happen and tell a story about what it might be like.

  • I think we found those Hillary voters that actually moved to Canada.

    Summary title: "US Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change"
    From TFA:

    at schools like the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Toronto, academics are attempting to download and save as much data as possible. The Canadian school on Saturday is set to host a "guerilla archiving event" in collaboration with the Internet Archive's End of Term 2016 project, which will archive the federal online pages and data that are in danger of disappearing during the Trump administration, including climate change, water, air and toxics programs.

  • Dear Scientists. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @11:28AM (#53508051) Homepage

    Release ALL OF IT as a torrent and encourage people around the globe to download it.

    Honestly all this shit needs to be in the hands of regular people and not sequestered away for only the chosen to look at.

    • Unfortunately, there is the Dunning-Kruger effect to contend with. Picture a hundred amateurs on youtube trying to draw graphs in Excel and reaching all sorts of crazy conclusions.

  • They should send all their data to Wikileaks, or otherwise put it somewhere on the public Internet not hosted on a U.S.-based server, then let the general Internet public know it's there so it can all be copied and diseminated widely and freely. We all know that once you post something on the Internet it's never, ever going completely away, and I believe this is their best strategy to preserve and protect the products of their research. Between that data being released and data from scientists in other coun
    • Another thought I just had on this subject, which I'm surprised I didn't think of when writing the original comment (I have a cold today, not totally awake yet :-/ ): They should bundle all their data up and send it to their colleagues in other countries, assuming that is that they haven't already done so. Who better to safeguard the products of their research than their fellow scientists? Seems to me that any real scientist, understanding the situation, would scruplously guard and protect another's work, e
    • by lxs ( 131946 )

      Wikileaks would be the worst place to send it, given their recent actions.

  • Does anyone know if torrents are being set up for replication?

  • by NotSoHeavyD3 ( 1400425 ) on Sunday December 18, 2016 @01:40PM (#53508791) Journal
    It's too bad that there's no massive network of interconnected computers that researchers could have release all their research in all sciences over the past 20+ years openly for all of mankind to benefit from instead of having to keep it at the mercy of scientific journals. If something like that existed then it would basically be impossible to censor as it would spread and be archived all over the world. Oh well, back on the internet to watch cat videos.
  • The data for reproducing climate model predictions and published research already should be fully released, and as a practical matter, archived. Here is a set of links:

    http://www.realclimate.org/ind... [realclimate.org]

    So what is this other data that they are trying to rescue from Trump?

    If there is data missing, then that should be published. The climate research community might also want to update their computational tools from the dusty Fortran decks to something more modern. Everybody should be able to reproduce climate m

    • Everybody should be able to reproduce climate models on a modern desktop computer with a GPU and check for themselves.

      Do you know how much computational power it takes to run climate models? Anyone with a desktop and GPU is not going to be able to replicate many of these models' results. You need supercomputers on the scale of the Top 500 to do that sort of thing, you idiot.

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