Guest post by David Middleton
AT 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.
Their undertaking, at the time, was purely speculative, based on travails of Canadian government scientists under the Stephen Harper administration, which muzzled them from speaking about climate change. Researchers watched as Harper officials threw thousands of books of aquatic data into dumpsters as federal environmental research libraries closed.
But three days later, speculation became reality as news broke that the incoming Trump administration’s EPA transition team does indeed intend to remove some climate data from the agency’s website. That will include references to President Barack Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and the strategies for 2014 and 2015 to cut methane, according to an unnamed source who spoke with Inside EPA. “It’s entirely unsurprising,” said Bethany Wiggin, director of the environmental humanities program at Penn and one of the organizers of the data-rescuing event.
[…]
Firstly… If I was a member of the incoming Trump administration, I would be racing to preserve climate data, particularly un-adjusted climate data, from the outgoing management of NOAA, NASA, EPA, etc.
Secondly… I would undo the reorganization of NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center into the National Centers for Environmental Information. While “data” and “information” are related, they aren’t the same thing.
Thirdly… WTF???
[S]peculation became reality as news broke that the incoming Trump administration’s EPA transition team does indeed intend to remove some climate data from the agency’s website. That will include references to President Barack Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and the strategies for 2014 and 2015 to cut methane, according to an unnamed source…
References to “President Barack Obama’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and the strategies for 2014 and 2015 to cut methane” aren’t data. It is information. Maybe the Rogue Scientists are unaware of the fact that President Obama’s plans and strategies expire in about 4 hours and 30 minutes.
This bit is rich…
But data, no matter how expertly it is harvested, isn’t useful divorced from its meaning. “It no longer has the beautiful context of being a website, it’s just a data set,” Allen says.
That’s where the librarians came in. In order to be used by future researchers—or possibly used to repopulate the data libraries of a future, more science-friendly administration—the data would have to be untainted by suspicions of meddling. So the data must be meticulously kept under a “secure chain of provenance.” In one corner of the room, volunteers were busy matching data to descriptors like which agency the data came from, when it was retrieved, and who was handling it. Later, they hope, scientists can properly input a finer explanation of what the data actually describes.
They’re looking for data at the EPA and NOAA that’s “untainted by suspicions of meddling”…
I’m thinking how wonderful that as the AGW scam begins to disintegrate, WUWT reaches 300million.
Thank you for so much Mr Watts!
I would start with the current NASA/GISS and NOAA global surface temperature records with their “World’s highest temperature since records began” and break it down into surface/ocean and country by country and then ask the current owners of the information to produce, level by level, adjustments back to the original & unadjusted raw data. I would then ask them to justify each and every adjustment. If they cannot do that or the original data has been “lost” then clearly they would need to be dismissed and a new team brought in to find all the original data and then build up a new record and publish all the steps they have taken and why.
There is no other way. They need to get back to the original data and the circumstances under which the recordings were made. No doubt Judith Curry could assist in ascertaining the real uncertainties and what these would do to confidence levels. This would take a while, but needs to be done.
They also need to look at sea level changes and why gauge and satellite recordings now diverge.
The original raw data came from the weather bureaus of foreign countries. It’s recoverable, if those countries were paid to send it in again. Why not make a bid for it?
Capitalism?? You’re killin’ em.
So this is what it looks like when the Ministry of Truth closes down. Interesting.
So let me get this straight … the people who fought tooth-and-nail to hide the data and methods they use are suddenly rushing to preserve the data and methods that they said they would rather delete than make publicly available. And yet the DJT team is somehow the bad guy. Make sense. I’m glad they are rushing to preserve such data. We have been asking for it for at least a decade now!
Not the same people. These “rogue scientists” are the useful idiots who actually think that the data is valid. Poor fools…
“…are suddenly rushing to preserve the data…”
No, obviously not. They are only preserving the fraudulent output of their homoginising process. Nobody needs the original data. It would be a great embarrassment if the world somehow discovered it.
I was thinking the other day that there seems to be a near-psychosis amongst some of the groups of people protesting aboutTrump and Brexit. They seem to have actually lost touch with reality. It’s a bit embarrassing and bit worrying.
I have no problem with people demonstrating. Everyone has a right to an opinion and a right to let others know it.
What I do have a problem with, and it’s something that seems to be endemic amongst creatures of the left is this attitude that they have a right to force others to pay attention to them. Be it shutting down highways, or making it impossible to get to work, or to do you work even if you can get there.
I was reading this morning about a particular snowflake who set a fire in the middle of a road. Why, it was to demonstrate to the world how upset he was that Trump was going to be president. (That road is going to need repair work after the fire is put out, So it’s vandalism as well.)
Of course the pyromaniac will shift responsibility for his actions and claim that the govt should repair the road, since it was their fault that he acted in civil disobedience. Actually, it was the media’s spin on reality that incited this kook more than anything.
Tim, I don’t know if “lost touch” is accurate. From what I’ve observed, most of these people and groups have had no familiarity with any form of reality in decades.
Some of them are being paid by Soros.
Tim – who is protesting Brexit?
If someone had predicted all this panic, angst, and irrationality last october I wouldn’t have believed them. Obviously my cynicism is not in high enough gear.
I was reading an article this morning about how colleges are setting up safe places for students who are too traumatized by this inauguration to function properly.
PS: Speaking of irrational, I was reminded this morning that many in the crowd loudly boo’d President Bush when he was introduced during Obama’s first inauguration. Even the left wing commentators were taken aback by such boorish behavior.
Mr. Obama and his pals have worked very, very hard to delegitimize this election.
So all you believers, if your science is undisputed why is it necessary to destroy the evidence. At what point do you question the why’s that everyone of us have seen.
If there was any proper science involved, all the data would have been archived anyway.
If there is a competent IT department involved, anything archived has been backed up.
If there was proper science involved all of the data would be readily available to the general public.
Data being archived does not mean that it cannot be deleted by presidential order. Ditto backups. NCDC/NGDC/NODC (now collected as NCEI) back up and archive their data, for instance. Also get checksums in creating their archive, or in getting data from the original sources, to verify that the data transferred correctly and/or are still readable from the archive.
But, no different than how the climate change pages on the whitehouse.gov site disappeared within about an hour of the inauguration, if the president wants the data deleted, zeroes out the budget for staff or hardware, or so on, then the data are gone.
Archival by one institution does not mean the data are secure forever, or even 4 years. That’s why I’ve thought since early days of the web that it was important to have multiple independent archives of important data.
I wonder how much of the critical and most relevant original data sets are held by the honest guys like Don Easterbrook and Paul Homewood?
One of the greatest fears of Leftists is that their opponents will actually resort to the same tactics they utilize, and one of their greatest accusations is that their opponents actually do resort to the same tactics they utilize.
The way the lefties have been destroying their opponents as we have seen lately, is to misrepresent what they say. The way to defeat a lefty is to quote them accurately.
A way to help the de-politicisation of environmental science would be to have a rigid separation between data capture and data processing, i.e. EPA becomes EMA (Environmental Monitoring Agency), NOAA gets limited to ocean and atmospheric measurements, etc. Separate (much smaller and easier to control) govt bodies, and anyone else interested, can then do interpretation and pontification.
So you eliminate the National Weather Service, National Ocean Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and OAR? Leaving only NESDIS (satellites, plus NCDC/NODC/NGDC).
When the biggest fraud in history begins to unravel it’s clear that the culprits think that burying the evidence may save them from future prosecution for the role they played. It seems to me as noted in other posts the only ones who destroy data are the warmists because it is the data which is going to implicate them. Self preservation is a strong motivator and I would not be surprised if a number of whistleblowers emerge from the ranks to blow this scam sky high.
The Van Pelt library. Was that named for Charles Shultz’s character Lucy Van Pelt (aka “the doctor is IN”)? Check your blankets at the door folks.
Rogue Scientists.
A bunch of wild and crazy guys, I’m sure.
Rogue? Like this?
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pictures+of+rogue&view=detailv2&qpvt=pictures+of+rogue&id=D9E8AA8095D044FBDCF45692497761CB171F8A56&selectedIndex=0&ccid=Zbh7IMBD&simid=607987673289264253&thid=OIP.M65b87b20c043a26d6e82a4dde76ba3daH0&ajaxhist=0
Sure, but when there’s a FOIA or a request to replicate their methodology, all the data mysteriously disappears.
These people are beyond parody.
Fox News just announced that the new Trump administration has removed FORMER President Obama’s Climate website. A good start!
That was meant to depress you. Better get with the program if you want to be politically correct. Oh, wait!
“…One Nation, Under God, With Liberty and Justice For All.”
May God bless the United States of America, and all who love it!
Messing around and destroying the data of any kind, that are a national artifact, is still a criminal offense, regardless of any excuses and “justification”., ,
cheers
What is the criminal code citation for this? And what is the definition of ‘national artifact’ that applies to data?
What a relief. Until now the data has been lost, hiding, tortured, screaming and lying . . . now it’s laughing. Good Gif.
HMMM
They’re looking for data at the EPA and NOAA that’s “untainted by suspicions of meddling”…
Now THAT really IS rich.
So to protect the Data that hasn’t been tainted by meddling (adjustments) they are archiving the NOAAs already heavily adjusted Data sources
The story :
“Their undertaking, at the time, was purely speculative, based on travails of Canadian government scientists under the Stephen Harper administration, which muzzled them from speaking about climate change. Researchers watched as Harper officials threw thousands of books of aquatic data into dumpsters as federal environmental research libraries closed.”
is so fake, so fake.
Would you be able to expand on your comment. Are you saying that the data wasn’t dumped? If so, more information about where the story came from and how it is fake would be very good.
Sure, I’m all for the truth. I will have to some research to locate the information that shows in detail how this is fake. My recollection is that “the data” was simply duplicate documentation or redundant.
“DFO has reduced 11 libraries to four, leaving two major centres in B.C. and Nova Scotia, and two subsidiary locations in Nova Scotia and in Ottawa. These libraries contain a wealth of scientific information, ranging from rare publications to historic environmental assessments and baseline data. The department, though, said it has not reduced any of its collection; rather, it said it weeded out duplicates and will eventually make all of the information available via interlibrary loans and through digital databases.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/suspicions-over-library-consolidation-as-critics-complain-harper-government-is-trashing-important-books
I am aware of some of the “data” destruction in Canada. The Freshwater Institute at the U of Manitoba closed its library. IIRC the faculty, staff and students were told they could take and keep anything they wanted – and given plenty of time to search. Most of the material discarded hadn’t been checked out or used for decades. Obviously, the whole collection could have been transferred to the main library. The fact that it wasn’t signifies that the material was badly outdated, useless, of questionable quality or unknown origin. Most raw data, if it has any value, will have been analyzed and presented in a publication. When I retired I threw out boxes of “raw data”, field notes and communications from studies published 45 years earlier. This is the “stuff” they would be talking about if it had been stored in a “library” instead of a storage room.
The end is nigh CAGW hucksters, your funding has vanished in a flash! Preserve all the phony data
you can find, your hoax is dead.
They rescued it by putting it on hillary’s email server. Doh!
I wonder if they think that junk will be collector’s treasure in a few decades?
Like Disney cartoon frames?
After all these years we discover the consensus (con)science is neither collective nor indestructible