8 ms·

Scientists are copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump

45 points by mozumder 10y ago

epistasis 10y ago
It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science because it conflicts with their ideology. If anybody hasn't heard of Lysenkoism, it's definitely worth reading about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
- hash-set 10y ago
  Yeah, Democrats never did that with say, gun control, for just one example! I see a lot of projection going on here. I guess I'm one of those awful "climate skeptics" but with the benefit of having worked on some of the research through a contract I had with the EPA. Like everything, climate change has plenty of truth to it, it's just that it has become such an echo chamber and worse, the Marxists would like to use it as an excuse for global domination--which isn't going to happen. Untie the science from the politics! I'm not sure that's truly possible, but that's what it will take. When half the people studying it are no longer lefties, maybe then we can have real science again.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    >...the Marxists would like to use it as an excuse for global domination... Four post (and counting) on this same topic form the same guy. I wish there were a place where sane (let alone well informed) people could discuss serious issues related to science and not be hammered by screeching ideologues.
    - fusiongyro 10y ago
      What sort of discussion are you interested in having that this guy is preventing?
      - whybroke 10y ago
        Excessive comments trigger the 'controversial topic' penalty which drives it from the front page. A conversation requires informed participants. There are few participants on topics that aren't seen. Presumably there is a connection between being skilled and being too busy to look beyond the front page. Or being skilled and wanting to waste time sorting through conspiracy theories for meaty posts. It's almost trivial to suppress any information that annoys a group by starting a emotion driven fight over nonsense. Climate change denial is not an intellectually honest different interpretation that can be cleared up by pointing to yet more data. It is a world view that requires obfuscating data. On the most primative level, trolling will due for that.
        fusiongyro 10y ago
        OK... so what conversation were you hoping to have, that this guy is stopping you from having?
        whybroke 10y ago
        The unstated premises of your one sentence rhetorical is that spam, trolling and elevated emotions do not degrade discourse. This is erroneous. I (if my personal case matters) was hoping to observe a conversation among well informed persons on a topic that I could learn from. Out of intellectual curiosity, the only reason I dawdle on this site. The instant the topic become controversial, that hope disappeared. Thus I expressed my displeasure at that. And instead I am now having a conversation about conversations with a single person in the least efficient way possible. QED the conversation has been damaged.
        fusiongyro 10y ago
        Actually, my premise is that there's not much interesting to say about this story. And you haven't come up with anything interesting to say about the topic of "scientists copying US climate data." I contend that this is because there isn't much interesting to say about it, and you haven't done anything to refute that. The rest is just fruitless handwringing and getting yourself spun up. And this is why I was in favor of the political cleanse, and remain in favor of it.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > > It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science because it conflicts with their ideology. > Democrats never did that with say, gun control, Correct; the anti-science position on that (to the extent of actually blocking science from being done for fear that it might contradict their policy preference) is taken by Republicans, much as is the case with climate science.
- dekhn 10y ago
  Interestingly, there has been a recent surge in studies of evolution form the Lysenko perspective in the field of epigenetics. It does appear there are some situations which are better explained by it than by darwinian evolution. That said it doesn't justify what the Soviets did.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    As somebody in the field, that is a gross mischaracterization of epigenetics. There are a few examples of adaptive epigenetic modifications, but they are interestinf curiosities, not the the main results of the research. And of course epigenetics fully embraces all of genetics.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      My PhD is in biophysics; I've worked with genomes for about 25 years. Are you saying this paper is wrong? http://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13062-016-0111-z http://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s130... because Eugene Koonin is a highly respected geneticist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin) who is generally scrupulous. I hardly consider his conclusions "interesting curiosities", rather they appear to be fundamental biological processes. Also, most things people call interesting curiosities end up being important. For example, when I was a postdoc my advisor helped discover the importance of nonsense-mediated decay. In 1 year the field went from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is a major process".
      - epistasis 10y ago
        Thanks for linking to an actual paper. I think there's been some confusion on the term, as well as some disagreement on emphasis. I'd make a few distinctions: 1) my comments were on Lysenkoism, not Lamarckism. There is a world of difference, in terms of one being the political negation of genetics, and the other being a "competing" theory of genetics. There is essentially nothing about Lysenko's views of, say, agriculture, that have passed into epigenetics. I would agree that epigenetics of course explains some Lamarckian evolution observations. 2) Though epigenetics is the source of lamarckian evolution, for example in this sentence: >Going further into epigenetics (an important source of quasi-Lamarckian mode of evolution), The study of epigenetics only rarely gets into Lamarkian phenomenon. The modification of histones and DNA methylation, the meat of epigeneticsm, is largely studied as sources of differentiation and gene regulation. The inter-generational passage of information is a very small subset of the body of work. Just to make sure that I'm not biased by my primary field (cancer), I went to scholar.google.com and went through the first page of results on an "epigenetics" search. I would stand by assessment that Lamarkcian evolution is one of the curiosities explained by epigenetics, rather than being the focus of much research. 3) Inheritance of adaptive traits by the microbial immune system (at least that's how Crispr regions were described to me before Crispr/CAS9 captured the imagination of the world) are pretty cool. But there are all sorts of interesting adaptations like that; if we view cancer as a population of individual cells evolving to compete against normal somatic tissues, we see both epigenetic and genetic mechanisms of inheritance among cell generations. I would definitely agree that its a spectrum of evolutionary behavior, but of the examples that we commonly see in the world, the Lamarckian examples of evolution are a minority. 4) As far as going from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is cool" I had the same experience with Crispr/CAS9. An archael researcher had been going on about it in hushed terms about this process for probably 18 months, without me understanding the significance, but then all of a sudden everybody's like "genomic DNA modification just got easier!" 5) I consider epigenetics, and gene regulation in general, to be of the utmost importance in the study of biology. Given the choice between getting the DNA of an organism or the RNA, I'd take the RNA any day. Edit: I should add that I've had the Waddington landscape as a computer desktop background image for more than five years. https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+landscape&safe=active&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi018-hifLQAhVDu7wKHQrHCasQ_AUICCgB&biw=1205&bih=1352 https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+landscape&safe=ac...
- r_smart 10y ago
  Look up Jonathan Haidt's discussion on science denial and political ideology. It's not just for conservatives / Republicans. Everyone does it.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    Never said it was, and In fact I encounter all sorts of science denial from the left. However these people have no sway over the party and the party leaders disagree. At this moment in time, the leadership of one party is actively hostile to the pursuit of truth, and they must be held accountable instead of it bein whitewashed with false equivalences.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Everyone does it. Like, say, acting out of internalized ethnic bias, everyone does it, but not everyone does it equally, and that everyone does it to some extent is no reason not to call out the KKK (or their anti-science analogs) as a particular problem.
    - r_smart 10y ago
      Anything to get a reference to Hitler or the KKK in, eh?
hughw 10y ago
They should make data publicly available and available for replication anyway. That goes for all data collected on NSF, NIH, and other government funding sources.
- fusiongyro 10y ago
  As an employee of the NRAO, I can tell you almost everything collected is publicly available. We do respect a proprietary period of one year, during which only the principal investigator's team can access the data, but after that those observations become public. Our internal storage cluster holds around half a petabyte. If anybody wanted to, they could certainly mirror it, but since we're talking about radio astronomy data here it's not likely to be interesting to anybody but a radio astronomer. You can of course take a CASA tutorial and learn how to reduce that data yourself! To the best of my knowledge, this is general policy for the NSF and other NSF-funded institutions have the same charge. Archive development is a big topic for all scientific institutions. It's actually a fairly significant part of my job.
- saboot 10y ago
  All for making publicly funded research more accessible. Also, if impediments on continuing climate research are put in place, at least some nonprofit privately funded grants could continue what they can.
fusiongyro 10y ago
I think it's overly paranoid, personally, but there's no reason not to have more backups if possible. Just adding up the few rows in the spreadsheet that have size estimates, it's going to be at least 0.2 PB. I hope they can find enough donor to supply the storage.
nonbel 10y ago
1) They should have done this long ago anyway. 2) I don't really understand this. If Trump thinks it is a "hoax", why would he try to delete the evidence of their crime? 3) "One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration." Good, mission creep is the main tool used to destroy government agencies. 4) This seems like chicken little behavior. I really doubt anyone is going to "delete" any data, instead they will stop getting funding to store it, run the servers, etc. But once again, if he thinks it is a "hoax" he would want more people to access the data.
- saboot 10y ago
  Good? NASA plays a very important role in climate science by providing and researching satellites and instrumentation for monitoring earth's climate.
  - nonbel 10y ago
    I may have edited after your response. Good, because mission creep. Just look what it did to the FDA: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4329b_02_01_FDA%20Report%20on%20Science%20and%20Technology.pdf http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4329b_0...
    - saboot 10y ago
      I don't care about the FDA. NASA plays a very important role, one which they have great expertise at, in instrumentation for measuring earth's climate from outer space. It's irresponsible to disregard all of that for a vague notion of "mission creep".
      - nonbel 10y ago
        It really is not vague at all. You give people more responsibility with less time/funding and everything goes to shit. I recommend reading that report to see how it works.
throw12313221 10y ago
Is not there a ban on political subjects this week? Anyway it is quite a funny situation. Some climate scientists had to fight tooth and nail, to get raw climate data available. And mirroring online data and media content, has been a best practice in some communities for several years.
- cypherpunks01 10y ago
  I thought it was last week, and I think it was canceled early as well.
  - internaut 10y ago
    Civility has deteriorated since.
- grzm 10y ago
  The week-long experiment was terminated early. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
peterwwillis 10y ago
Remember 8 years ago when Obama was taking office and gun sales shot through the roof because everyone thought Obama was going to 'take their guns'? Perhaps the fear here, as was then, is not entirely justified. Just because something is possible does not make it probable. But if it gets people off their ass and organizing to defend their positions, all the better.
- soneil 10y ago
  It does strike me as a bit of an over-reaction - but a perfectly harmless one at that. If they’re completely wrong and off-base, the result is simply too many backups. I think I’m okay with that.
- epistasis 10y ago
  That's a ridiculous comparison. Obama had never made any moves about "taking guns." Trump has campaigned on climate change being a "hoax" and has denigrated the science for years. Then before taking office he's already asking for lists of individuals that generate this data, when there is absolutely no use for this list other than intimidation. If Obama had asked for registry of all the gun shops and their owners a month before taking office after years of calling for taking away guns, then, sure, go ahead and make the comparison. Otherwise its just a misleading false equivalency.
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    The comparison is valid because both are examples of people trying to justify their fears of what may happen because of what they see as a clear intent, when there is no actual proof of intent. The fact that a candidate may have asked for lists of client scientists after calling climate change a hoax, and that from this alone you extrapolate that he must be aiming to delete their data, is association fallacy.
    - epistasis 10y ago
      >what they see as a clear intent, when there is no actual proof of intent. You have ignored the actual contents of my post. On one side of this, the "what" is nonexistent or completely fabricated. On the other side, there are unprecedented and chilling political demands. The view from 30,000 feet can make dissimilar things look similar, but that doesn't mean that it's the best view. Details matter.
sp332 10y ago
The Internet Archive would take it, I'm sure. And they're just shoring up their backup in Canada. http://archive.org/donate http://archive.org/donate ArchiveTeam has been working on publicly-available data from government websites as well. They don't seem to have a page on the wiki yet, but here's the list they're going from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5ciVztsDMJcZ2SVs1BrfqYCc/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5... Edit: that's actually a list made up by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, however AT is grabbing it as well.
lyschoening 10y ago
Now that Trump's cabinet picks are becoming public, all bets are off. It is entirely likely that vital U.S. research projects will be shut down at short notice. I don't think these scientists are being paranoid at all. The data, while public, is on government funded servers and Trump and his cabinet will soon have great influence over that government. People who look at Trump's decision not to build a wall or not to prosecute Hillary as a sign of moderation are missing the bigger picture. We can expect a worst case outcome on anything Trump can profit from that can make it through a Republican congress.
- hash-set 10y ago
  I see it as a much needed breath of fresh air, haha.
- dekhn 10y ago
  wouldn't shutting down research projects cause large losses of jobs, and further, cause downstream effects on the suppliers (DOE has a multibillion dollar budget, there are many companies that provide expensive toys to DOE, etc etc)? That seems to go against Trump's message about jobs...
  - lyschoening 10y ago
    So far Trump has always said what he needed to say to accomplish his goals, not the other way round. I am sure any government funds that profit him directly or indirectly will keep flowing, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that he is motivated by the prospect of keeping jobs.
  - goalieca 10y ago
    His message of populism is empty
xname2 10y ago
OK. So Trump is the coming president, and GW is real and Trump will not handle it properly. So it is very likely GW bad predictions are going to happen. My question is: when will we start to see massive sell of beach houses?
relics443 10y ago
What's to stop these scientists from fudging data to meet their agenda. Then they can point at the fed and claim they manipulated it. End of the story is trust no one, make your own backup of the data, and verify for yourself if anything has changed in the future.

45 points by mozumder 10y ago

It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science because it conflicts with their ideology. If anybody hasn't heard of Lysenkoism, it's definitely worth reading about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

hash-set 10y ago
Yeah, Democrats never did that with say, gun control, for just one example! I see a lot of projection going on here. I guess I'm one of those awful "climate skeptics" but with the benefit of having worked on some of the research through a contract I had with the EPA. Like everything, climate change has plenty of truth to it, it's just that it has become such an echo chamber and worse, the Marxists would like to use it as an excuse for global domination--which isn't going to happen. Untie the science from the politics! I'm not sure that's truly possible, but that's what it will take. When half the people studying it are no longer lefties, maybe then we can have real science again.
- whybroke 10y ago
  >...the Marxists would like to use it as an excuse for global domination... Four post (and counting) on this same topic form the same guy. I wish there were a place where sane (let alone well informed) people could discuss serious issues related to science and not be hammered by screeching ideologues.
  - fusiongyro 10y ago
    What sort of discussion are you interested in having that this guy is preventing?
    - whybroke 10y ago
      Excessive comments trigger the 'controversial topic' penalty which drives it from the front page. A conversation requires informed participants. There are few participants on topics that aren't seen. Presumably there is a connection between being skilled and being too busy to look beyond the front page. Or being skilled and wanting to waste time sorting through conspiracy theories for meaty posts. It's almost trivial to suppress any information that annoys a group by starting a emotion driven fight over nonsense. Climate change denial is not an intellectually honest different interpretation that can be cleared up by pointing to yet more data. It is a world view that requires obfuscating data. On the most primative level, trolling will due for that.
      - fusiongyro 10y ago
        OK... so what conversation were you hoping to have, that this guy is stopping you from having?
        whybroke 10y ago
        The unstated premises of your one sentence rhetorical is that spam, trolling and elevated emotions do not degrade discourse. This is erroneous. I (if my personal case matters) was hoping to observe a conversation among well informed persons on a topic that I could learn from. Out of intellectual curiosity, the only reason I dawdle on this site. The instant the topic become controversial, that hope disappeared. Thus I expressed my displeasure at that. And instead I am now having a conversation about conversations with a single person in the least efficient way possible. QED the conversation has been damaged.
        fusiongyro 10y ago
        Actually, my premise is that there's not much interesting to say about this story. And you haven't come up with anything interesting to say about the topic of "scientists copying US climate data." I contend that this is because there isn't much interesting to say about it, and you haven't done anything to refute that. The rest is just fruitless handwringing and getting yourself spun up. And this is why I was in favor of the political cleanse, and remain in favor of it.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > > It's pretty scary when a political party has taken a hostile stance to science because it conflicts with their ideology. > Democrats never did that with say, gun control, Correct; the anti-science position on that (to the extent of actually blocking science from being done for fear that it might contradict their policy preference) is taken by Republicans, much as is the case with climate science.
dekhn 10y ago
Interestingly, there has been a recent surge in studies of evolution form the Lysenko perspective in the field of epigenetics. It does appear there are some situations which are better explained by it than by darwinian evolution. That said it doesn't justify what the Soviets did.
- epistasis 10y ago
  As somebody in the field, that is a gross mischaracterization of epigenetics. There are a few examples of adaptive epigenetic modifications, but they are interestinf curiosities, not the the main results of the research. And of course epigenetics fully embraces all of genetics.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    My PhD is in biophysics; I've worked with genomes for about 25 years. Are you saying this paper is wrong? http://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13062-016-0111-z http://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s130... because Eugene Koonin is a highly respected geneticist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin) who is generally scrupulous. I hardly consider his conclusions "interesting curiosities", rather they appear to be fundamental biological processes. Also, most things people call interesting curiosities end up being important. For example, when I was a postdoc my advisor helped discover the importance of nonsense-mediated decay. In 1 year the field went from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is a major process".
    - epistasis 10y ago
      Thanks for linking to an actual paper. I think there's been some confusion on the term, as well as some disagreement on emphasis. I'd make a few distinctions: 1) my comments were on Lysenkoism, not Lamarckism. There is a world of difference, in terms of one being the political negation of genetics, and the other being a "competing" theory of genetics. There is essentially nothing about Lysenko's views of, say, agriculture, that have passed into epigenetics. I would agree that epigenetics of course explains some Lamarckian evolution observations. 2) Though epigenetics is the source of lamarckian evolution, for example in this sentence: >Going further into epigenetics (an important source of quasi-Lamarckian mode of evolution), The study of epigenetics only rarely gets into Lamarkian phenomenon. The modification of histones and DNA methylation, the meat of epigeneticsm, is largely studied as sources of differentiation and gene regulation. The inter-generational passage of information is a very small subset of the body of work. Just to make sure that I'm not biased by my primary field (cancer), I went to scholar.google.com and went through the first page of results on an "epigenetics" search. I would stand by assessment that Lamarkcian evolution is one of the curiosities explained by epigenetics, rather than being the focus of much research. 3) Inheritance of adaptive traits by the microbial immune system (at least that's how Crispr regions were described to me before Crispr/CAS9 captured the imagination of the world) are pretty cool. But there are all sorts of interesting adaptations like that; if we view cancer as a population of individual cells evolving to compete against normal somatic tissues, we see both epigenetic and genetic mechanisms of inheritance among cell generations. I would definitely agree that its a spectrum of evolutionary behavior, but of the examples that we commonly see in the world, the Lamarckian examples of evolution are a minority. 4) As far as going from "lunatic fringe" to "OMG this is cool" I had the same experience with Crispr/CAS9. An archael researcher had been going on about it in hushed terms about this process for probably 18 months, without me understanding the significance, but then all of a sudden everybody's like "genomic DNA modification just got easier!" 5) I consider epigenetics, and gene regulation in general, to be of the utmost importance in the study of biology. Given the choice between getting the DNA of an organism or the RNA, I'd take the RNA any day. Edit: I should add that I've had the Waddington landscape as a computer desktop background image for more than five years. https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+landscape&safe=active&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi018-hifLQAhVDu7wKHQrHCasQ_AUICCgB&biw=1205&bih=1352 https://www.google.com/search?q=waddington+landscape&safe=ac...
r_smart 10y ago
Look up Jonathan Haidt's discussion on science denial and political ideology. It's not just for conservatives / Republicans. Everyone does it.
- epistasis 10y ago
  Never said it was, and In fact I encounter all sorts of science denial from the left. However these people have no sway over the party and the party leaders disagree. At this moment in time, the leadership of one party is actively hostile to the pursuit of truth, and they must be held accountable instead of it bein whitewashed with false equivalences.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Everyone does it. Like, say, acting out of internalized ethnic bias, everyone does it, but not everyone does it equally, and that everyone does it to some extent is no reason not to call out the KKK (or their anti-science analogs) as a particular problem.
  - r_smart 10y ago
    Anything to get a reference to Hitler or the KKK in, eh?

hughw 10y ago

They should make data publicly available and available for replication anyway. That goes for all data collected on NSF, NIH, and other government funding sources.

fusiongyro 10y ago
As an employee of the NRAO, I can tell you almost everything collected is publicly available. We do respect a proprietary period of one year, during which only the principal investigator's team can access the data, but after that those observations become public. Our internal storage cluster holds around half a petabyte. If anybody wanted to, they could certainly mirror it, but since we're talking about radio astronomy data here it's not likely to be interesting to anybody but a radio astronomer. You can of course take a CASA tutorial and learn how to reduce that data yourself! To the best of my knowledge, this is general policy for the NSF and other NSF-funded institutions have the same charge. Archive development is a big topic for all scientific institutions. It's actually a fairly significant part of my job.
saboot 10y ago
All for making publicly funded research more accessible. Also, if impediments on continuing climate research are put in place, at least some nonprofit privately funded grants could continue what they can.

fusiongyro 10y ago

I think it's overly paranoid, personally, but there's no reason not to have more backups if possible. Just adding up the few rows in the spreadsheet that have size estimates, it's going to be at least 0.2 PB. I hope they can find enough donor to supply the storage.

nonbel 10y ago

1) They should have done this long ago anyway. 2) I don't really understand this. If Trump thinks it is a "hoax", why would he try to delete the evidence of their crime? 3) "One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration." Good, mission creep is the main tool used to destroy government agencies. 4) This seems like chicken little behavior. I really doubt anyone is going to "delete" any data, instead they will stop getting funding to store it, run the servers, etc. But once again, if he thinks it is a "hoax" he would want more people to access the data.

saboot 10y ago
Good? NASA plays a very important role in climate science by providing and researching satellites and instrumentation for monitoring earth's climate.
- nonbel 10y ago
  I may have edited after your response. Good, because mission creep. Just look what it did to the FDA: http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4329b_02_01_FDA%20Report%20on%20Science%20and%20Technology.pdf http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4329b_0...
  - saboot 10y ago
    I don't care about the FDA. NASA plays a very important role, one which they have great expertise at, in instrumentation for measuring earth's climate from outer space. It's irresponsible to disregard all of that for a vague notion of "mission creep".
    - nonbel 10y ago
      It really is not vague at all. You give people more responsibility with less time/funding and everything goes to shit. I recommend reading that report to see how it works.

throw12313221 10y ago

Is not there a ban on political subjects this week? Anyway it is quite a funny situation. Some climate scientists had to fight tooth and nail, to get raw climate data available. And mirroring online data and media content, has been a best practice in some communities for several years.

cypherpunks01 10y ago
I thought it was last week, and I think it was canceled early as well.
- internaut 10y ago
  Civility has deteriorated since.
grzm 10y ago
The week-long experiment was terminated early. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251

peterwwillis 10y ago

Remember 8 years ago when Obama was taking office and gun sales shot through the roof because everyone thought Obama was going to 'take their guns'? Perhaps the fear here, as was then, is not entirely justified. Just because something is possible does not make it probable. But if it gets people off their ass and organizing to defend their positions, all the better.

soneil 10y ago
It does strike me as a bit of an over-reaction - but a perfectly harmless one at that. If they’re completely wrong and off-base, the result is simply too many backups. I think I’m okay with that.
epistasis 10y ago
That's a ridiculous comparison. Obama had never made any moves about "taking guns." Trump has campaigned on climate change being a "hoax" and has denigrated the science for years. Then before taking office he's already asking for lists of individuals that generate this data, when there is absolutely no use for this list other than intimidation. If Obama had asked for registry of all the gun shops and their owners a month before taking office after years of calling for taking away guns, then, sure, go ahead and make the comparison. Otherwise its just a misleading false equivalency.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  The comparison is valid because both are examples of people trying to justify their fears of what may happen because of what they see as a clear intent, when there is no actual proof of intent. The fact that a candidate may have asked for lists of client scientists after calling climate change a hoax, and that from this alone you extrapolate that he must be aiming to delete their data, is association fallacy.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    >what they see as a clear intent, when there is no actual proof of intent. You have ignored the actual contents of my post. On one side of this, the "what" is nonexistent or completely fabricated. On the other side, there are unprecedented and chilling political demands. The view from 30,000 feet can make dissimilar things look similar, but that doesn't mean that it's the best view. Details matter.

sp332 10y ago

The Internet Archive would take it, I'm sure. And they're just shoring up their backup in Canada. http://archive.org/donate http://archive.org/donate ArchiveTeam has been working on publicly-available data from government websites as well. They don't seem to have a page on the wiki yet, but here's the list they're going from https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5ciVztsDMJcZ2SVs1BrfqYCc/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-__RqTqQxuxHNOln3H5... Edit: that's actually a list made up by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, however AT is grabbing it as well.

lyschoening 10y ago

Now that Trump's cabinet picks are becoming public, all bets are off. It is entirely likely that vital U.S. research projects will be shut down at short notice. I don't think these scientists are being paranoid at all. The data, while public, is on government funded servers and Trump and his cabinet will soon have great influence over that government. People who look at Trump's decision not to build a wall or not to prosecute Hillary as a sign of moderation are missing the bigger picture. We can expect a worst case outcome on anything Trump can profit from that can make it through a Republican congress.

hash-set 10y ago
I see it as a much needed breath of fresh air, haha.
dekhn 10y ago
wouldn't shutting down research projects cause large losses of jobs, and further, cause downstream effects on the suppliers (DOE has a multibillion dollar budget, there are many companies that provide expensive toys to DOE, etc etc)? That seems to go against Trump's message about jobs...
- lyschoening 10y ago
  So far Trump has always said what he needed to say to accomplish his goals, not the other way round. I am sure any government funds that profit him directly or indirectly will keep flowing, but I don't think we have any reason to believe that he is motivated by the prospect of keeping jobs.
- goalieca 10y ago
  His message of populism is empty

xname2 10y ago

OK. So Trump is the coming president, and GW is real and Trump will not handle it properly. So it is very likely GW bad predictions are going to happen. My question is: when will we start to see massive sell of beach houses?

relics443 10y ago

What's to stop these scientists from fudging data to meet their agenda. Then they can point at the fed and claim they manipulated it. End of the story is trust no one, make your own backup of the data, and verify for yourself if anything has changed in the future.