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”…
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crystalpoint Flash 1005 • a few seconds ago
There is no scientific evidence to support your claims! Once again, the organizations you get your info from, are relying on, are based upon computer generated models, developed by man/women! These studies rely on what information man/women puts into the computer, and this information is always biased!
No information gathered from the outer atmosphere from instruments placed in space, is capable of discerning the difference between nature, or man! Until this date, there is no instrument that has been developed, which can divide the two(2) elements! Remember this, insofar as “climate change” is concerned, there are businesses, and men who would make trillions of dollars to be made, based upon your theory and others, whom would profit on such action for man to tackle this subject on their own! This is the bottom line for those individuals and organizations who are pushing the agenda!
Sincerely, Ray P. Smith, Sr
When all the data that can be recovered is reviewed. The full scope of the AGW hoax will be reveled. This whole issue of climate change is more of a religious movement and less to do with actual hard science and real scientist know this. All we are seeing here is a classic cover-up, so what are these people really hiding. Maybe they are the ones who need to be in jail for fleecing people out of billions of taxpayer dollars for a hoax. Bad science isn’t an excuse…
The faithful recognise ‘the settled science’ of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ depends on hackers, rogue scientists, archivists, librarians, websites and the US president?
This means AGW is a political/religious movement even in their own eyes. Not objectively and independently verifiable scientific conclusion, such as pV=nRT.
On the basis of the article 2 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/, I hereby decline AGW and request governments to cease all initiatives contradicting the said declaration, starting with the UN.
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They’re emphasizing the importance of ensuring a key trust on how the information is stored, rather than it coming under scrutiny for lack of a “chain of trust.” This isn’t an unusual procedure when it comes to ensuring the integrity of data, including that which is transmitted between this website and my computer. Ask your local courthouse how they ensure the integrity of DNA samples admitted as evidence-there’s a chain of trust, a system of some sort that ensures the integrity of the sample.
How delusional do you have to be in order to frame such a statement into a suspicious context?
Second, I’m not sure who’s running the show here, but I highly doubt my uncle would be so ignorant as to write an opinion piece as if it were contrary to that of scientific facts. Furthermore, he’s always claimed to not be an “atmospheric scientists,” so I couldn’t imagine the writer positioned to have any purview or capacity to interpret or scrutinize any data related to any of the agencies referenced in this article, but rather in a position to regurgitate he said she said that’s promoted by lobbyists on behalf of welfare farmers that subsidize their production on my tax dollars, creating a surplus and waste of every product utilized during the production and the final production of the product, itself; market inefficiencies are a problem no matter what side of the aisle you sit on.
While I’m not an atmospheric scientists, in particular, I don’t see the point in further debating whether or not we believe the scientists data is accurately showing the CAUSE; I’m not going to argue with 99% of the scientific community. Regardless of where you stand on the matter, it’s an issue that we’re well aware of, including your Republicans sitting on the Committees that oversee the legislation regarding our energy sector, including the appropriations for such. My point is, you people need to move on from the debate of the cause, then figure out what steps we can take to get the situation under control.
Furthermore, a common rhetoric I hear attempting to dismiss clean energy is a claim that we need to focus on domestic oil and coal industries so we can be energy independent of foreign nations in the event we were to be forced into a Declaration of War, and to subdue conflicts of interest in the geopolitical sphere. My response to such rhetoric is simply this; what gives us more independence and freedom to lower our expenditure on energy than pursuing clean energy? It’s proven that the expenditure regarding such capital goods pay itself, greater than that of the former, because it lowers expenditure into the energy infrastructure greater than that of maintaining the old technologies and resources we are currently relying on. Given we would be advancing our energy sector to new technology that harvests resources in an unlimited abundance, this is an obviously apparent benefit to energy consumers. This would also free up budgetary concerns pertaining to the tax burden for the former, allowing us to invest in other industries, or simply save some money to get our deficit down. And for the national security hawks, we get the added benefit of pushing the European region off of their dependency on Russia for over 80% of their energy needs. This would rid us of many conflicts of interest in regards to taking action against the current Kremlin structure and their crimes over the past decades. The Soviet Union never fell, they simply changed the names of their war ships, for example; however, the Soviet power structure remained, and we held no tribunals to imprison those responsible for the atrocities enacted under the rule of the “Soviet Union.” It’s just a different name, along with a different face. The ideology and pursuits remain the same. I encourage those involved with this community to read Winter is Coming by Garry Kasparov; he survived behind the Iron Curtain, along with holding the title for World Chess Champion-his book is a light shed on long since forgotten history and a long streamline of chess moves made on the geopolitical board.
I get the fact that a lot of people are shaky about moving onto newer and brighter opportunities, because there are losers in the former, but that’s reality-that’s capital good advancement; that’s bank tellers to autonomous capital goods such as ATMs. You can’t fight the future, because you’re going to get stuck behind it. If you’re writing articles under this narrative (essentially lobbying the People), because you’re afraid of losing out on investments you may have in the past, then move onto the future; invest into the development of clean energy infrastructure. Any efforts taken to hinder this progress will be met with failure, and those bankrolling on halting such progress will be the losers. Even with ExxonMobil, with their enormous wealth that is greater to that of some 25 nations combined, must come to terms with this fact. Even the Republicans are legislating with acceptance of this underlying fact; the fact that is the causality behind the articles critiquing the climate threat, hoping to cause stagnation in the clean energy industry.
Quit fighting the passage of tomorrow, and move onto the issues that matter, such as the fight to preserve our democracy.
http://www.appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/hearing-on-the-future-of-nuclear-power