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Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down
- 0xy 1y ago[flagged]
- tristanb 1y agoGot any sources for that bro?
- testfrequency 1y agoThey never do. I always look up users like this after the fact and it’s always clear to me they got lost in sauce online, ended up on HN, and think they can just get away being edgy in a room full of professional nerd snipers.
- jjulius 1y ago>NOAA was caught using data from weather stations with faulty equipment and positioned next to new heat sources and only moved to correct the issue when confronted so I'd say this is entirely justified. The first step in any scientific process is clean data. Assuming this uncited assertion is true, why would it be "entirely justified" to simply remove it without any particular reason as to why, nor discussion around the concern over data accuracy? Seems to me that the scientific community would be better served with an open dialogue rather than mute removal.
- matmatmatmat 1y agoYes, normally in a case where data were later shown to have been taken incorrectly, you would remove just the incorrect data but leave an unmodified copy of the old data available somewhere. Or, just leave a very prominent note about the change with a detailed explanation somewhere else. You would not take down everything because 1. That would deprive taxpayers of the correct data they had already paid for, and 2. That would mess up the data ingestion pipelines of the researchers who depended on the data.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Ancalagon 1y ago[flagged]
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- anigbrowl 1y agoYeah we should definitely make policy based on claims from 15 year old Fox News articles, which are famous for their even-handedness and lack of editorial bias. https://www.foxnews.com/science/u-s-climate-data-compromised-by-sensors-proximity-to-heat-sources-critics-say https://www.foxnews.com/science/u-s-climate-data-compromised...
- aspenmayer 1y agoHere’s something from 2024. It’s not heat sources, but tampering with rain gauges in this case. https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/08/patrich-esch-ed-dean-jagers-ranchers-fraud-insurance/ https://coloradosun.com/2024/09/08/patrich-esch-ed-dean-jage... ( https://archive.is/jBh8H https://archive.is/jBh8H ) > Wrecked rain gauges. Whistleblowers. Million-dollar payouts and manhunts. Then a Colorado crop fraud got really crazy. > The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to falsify drought numbers by tampering with rain gauges on the plains of Colorado and Kansas, resulting in millions in false insurance claims
- jccalhoun 1y agoAnd even in that article it states: "If you use only the sites that currently have good siting versus those that have not-so-good siting, when you look at the adjusted data basically you get the same trend," said Jay Lawrimore, chief of the climate monitoring branch at NCDC. Lawrimore admitted that Watts' volunteers had discovered real problems with sensor siting, but he said that even when those sites' heat readings were adjusted down, they still showed a steady overall rise in temperatures. "The ultimate conclusion, the bottom line is that there really isn't evidence that the trends have a bias based on the current siting," he said. And surface station data is only a small subset of information confirming the warming of the climate, Lawrimore said.
- triceratops 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up
- NewJazz 1y agoAnd two decades before that, Inconvenient Truth.
- pstuart 1y agoAnd way before that, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here
- apgwoz 1y agoThe section of the population that needs to think about the Inconvenient Truth didn’t watch the movie, because they don’t watch documentaries unless it’s about a Poop Cruise, or a celebrity.
- bko 1y agoI think we rely too much on government mandated websites than we do practical common sense that could save lives. For instance, over 175,000 people die from heat exposure each year across the WHO European Region. Compare that to 1-2k in the US. In this case, the Don't Look Up scenario is that people don't want to get A/C and governments sometimes make it very hard for them, killing hundreds of thousands because... I don't know why. But at least EU has nice proclamations and accords on the risk of climate change. https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/01-08-2024-statement--heat-claims-more-than-175-000-lives-annually-in-the-who-european-region--with-numbers-set-to-soar https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/01-08-2024-statement--h... https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854
- triceratops 1y agoHow do governments make it "very hard" to get A/C?
- aaroninsf 1y agoThe current administration is not merely racists, autocratic, and hell bent on insuring all wealth is held by the oligarch class, it is also engaged in the most venal, short-sighted, and destructive assault on the basic functions of governance and civil society I can imagine. I don't care what one's view is on the appropriate scale and role of federal governance, some operations are best and only accomplished at that level, and this short of bullshit is not just a disservice to, it is an attack on the citizenry.
- janice1999 1y agoDestroying federal governance seems on point for people who read Yarvin and want to rule feudal micro-states as techno-kings.
- amarcheschi 1y agoI guess they see themselves as high officers in those states. I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"
- jfengel 1y agoYou don't have to see yourself as a high officer. You just have to imagine that you will be restored to your deserved state. In that state you are slightly better than average, and only those who are morally defective suffer. (Those are the ones who are now unjustly keeping you from succeeding on your merits.) The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.
- Larrikin 1y ago[flagged]
- Hikikomori 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoEarlier, without discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439836
- archildress 1y agoI just feel extremely sad about the mass quantity of events like this happening right now because they are all aggregate to huge negative effects but the average person knows nothing of it. It feels so unfixable.
- selfselfgo 1y ago[dead]
- beanjammin 1y agoThey certainly want us to feel like its unfixable, but it's not. Were govt to put the effort into the energy transition that we saw in the early days of covid we could zero our emissions, and relatively quickly. The technology is largely available, it needs to be implemented. The ties between the fossil fuel industry and the far right are clear. Apathy, indifference, inertia, they are all products of propaganda and updated Cambridge Analytica methods. Fossil fuel interests will stop at nothing to further their greed.
- schmidtleonard 1y ago[flagged]
- pjc50 1y agoYou weren't paying attention to his Twitter, then. The far right turn was extremely obvious.
- wmoxam 1y agoDon't look up!
- gmuslera 1y agoIt´s not so severe, it was just that those servers and the people maintaining them, melt in the latest heatwave. Nothing to worry about.
- thr0waway001 1y agoThat’s some 1984 shit right there yo!
- russdill 1y agoReally? I was thinking 4 or 5 decades before then
- mrtksn 1y agoRight, nice savings and opportunities for fossil energy industry. Good job. So what is the plan for handling the US nuclear warhead stockpile as the empire crumbles? I'm worried about billionaires with nukes. Maybe not the person directly but people behind all that envision super wealthy city-states and I totally expect those to have nukes. The nuclear codes won't stop anyone with time and engineers. These are intended for physically arming the strong link in the warhead that is supposed to send the signal to the exclusion zone but someone with unrestricted access should be able to override it and send the signal directly. Although over the years the mechanical systems were replaced with electronics that eventually become encrypted microelectronics, IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it. Safe against rough handlers(i.e. crazy solders) but won't stop people with unrestricted access.
- Henchman21 1y agoThere is no plan, and I am not sure why you’d think otherwise?
- mrtksn 1y agoI think there must be a plan after the USSR collapse. Somehow they did not let rough agents obtaining the warheads but there were enough rumors, literature and media around it to prompt a consideration IMHO.
- KerrAvon 1y agotl;dr: the Soviet state didn't collapse in the manner of a zombie apocalypse or environmental catastrophe, it collapsed politically; there was continuity in command / control until the weapons were all moved back physically into Russia. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16mab9x/when_the_ussr_collapsed_how_did_russia_end_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16mab9x/when...
- johannes1234321 1y agoBy the time you could act it's too late, if you don't want to dismantle the nukes independently. It's a consequence of the existence. Just imagine Biden having commanded to trigger a process which destroys the nuclear material (by triggering some degeneratio process or something) would that have been accepted or would everybody have said that limits U.S.'s strategic options permantly in too high degree?
- Havoc 1y agoGotta provide a smokescreen for “Drill baby drill”
- matcha-video 1y agoIt wasn't supposed to be literal :(
- deadbabe 1y agoThere are other countries.
- amarka 1y agoLet me fill you in on a secret: one of the reasons behind US’s dominance is that even though “there are other countries” that could do the hard science, the US is one of the only ones that did. Now the US is at risk of becoming just another one of those “other countries“.
- dyauspitr 1y agoWe’re well on our way to becoming them.
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- timr 1y ago[flagged]
- bombcar 1y agoIf you see your hosts file what the DNS used to show, does the server respond? That’s usually the real test.
- timr 1y agoI don't know, it's a good question. I don't have the IP addresses cached. NPR notes that the report is here [1], so if someone is trying to hide it, they're not doing a particularly good job. [1] https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61592 https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61592
- bombcar 1y agohttps://dnshistory.org/historical-dns-records/a/globalchange.gov https://dnshistory.org/historical-dns-records/a/globalchange... It seems to be maybe AWS, and manual IP action doesn't get anything.
- mulmen 1y agoSure, it is always DNS. But are other sites on that DNS also down? How long has this site been down? Has anyone acknowledged this outage? If the DNS is up and the domain is registered it starts to look like a takedown instead of a mistake. I do know that the EPA took down their EJScreen [1] dataset so it’s not like politically motivated takedowns are unprecedented under the current regime. [1]: https://screening-tools.com/epa-ejscreen https://screening-tools.com/epa-ejscreen
- Glant 1y agoAccording to someone from NASA, it was in fact shut down. NASA will eventually re-publish the reports. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-major-federal-climate-website/story?id=123389318 https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
- resters 1y agoAs the US slowly becomes N. Korea...
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- monetus 1y agoHow in the world did Juche become our national philosophy? I'm not sure, but I think about it all the time now. I'm on HN, so I tend to want to blame the ad industry. It's pretty nebulous to think that "made in America" directly snowballed into this; so many things did. The freakier nativism in advertising really could use a break right about now though.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoThere's no national philosophy. That's giving these people way too much credit. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman is 100% predictive and descriptive of how we got where we are.
- i80and 1y agoI do think USA-flavored Juche does some explanatory power for the group as a whole, even if the individuals lack any specific philosophy beyond hill climbing. I do also need to read Postman, though.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoLikewise, “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer describes some of the political processes that got us here. That along with “The Family” by Jeff Sharlet to provide a little color to the religious side.
- resters 1y agoI think the "advertising" was the billions spent on what were effectively anti-brown ads to help sell the Iraq/Afghan wars. Meanwhile in the 2000s the GSEs did not disclose their financials bc if they had perhaps the people would have felt the wars had a cost. Since then it's been gradual attacks on press freedom (WL exposed fraud/propaganda in the Iraq/Afghan wars) and massive profits by the defense industry, resulting in dramatically more lobbying money. Not to mention the US automotive industry and major banks getting bailed out and preventing many small economic corrections that should have occurred. Then 20 years after 9/11 when the US has spent 10s of TRILLIONS on wars and virtually nothing on infrastructure, industrial policy, etc., everyone wonders why China appears to be close to leapfrogging. The anti-brown propaganda and "USA USA" jingoism back in the early 2000s is still fresh, benefitting candidates with xenophobic and jingoistic messages. Many feel real economic pain but don't understand that you don't spend $20T without consequences -- plus scapegoating the weakest members of society is apparently more emotionally satisfying. By the time we got the pandemic both parties realized that they had more to gain from fiscal irresponsibility, and the tribalism of the government's anti-brown propaganda combined with the "multicultural solidarity" focus over class warfare by Dems, led to increasing tribalism and tribe-focused media. Now a large percentage of the population lives in a complete information bubble and is close to worshiping its political favorites as though they are religious icons. Thus now regardless of which party is in power, there will be a shift to censor and suppress information that is viewed as harmful to society. I honestly blame both parties for their share of this, but the ultimate culprit is feed algorithms that are optimized for emotionally potent content that creates engagement (and ad dollars) and nothing more. What is actually fascinating about the orignal TikTok is that the algorithm was so much more useful at showing interesting/appealing content that it pretty much overtook Insta, YouTube, and Netflix and required government intervention to stop its growth. This shows us clearly how the major social media platforms were not just wrong about how to maximize profits but wrong on how to entertain and engage people, mistakes that are only possible when there is really not much competition, which is how we now do capitalism in the US -- and by the way if you win you get nationalized.
- nektro 1y agoi think what contributes the most to my sense of dread is the feeling that if you were to tell these decision makers in govt right now "but this'll kill people!" they'd respond "good"
- jmholla 1y agoThey don't care about people. Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die."
- mandeepj 1y ago> Senator Joni Ernst when told that people would die due from the spending bill responded with, "Well, we are all going to die." reply Well, how many times has she seen a doctor in her life so far? Of course, more than one. Then, why did she do that if she is eventually going to die one day?
- rescripting 1y agoBecause she doesn’t see herself as “one of them”. She is the living embodiment of the Lord Farquaad meme: “Some of you are going to die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take”
- bix6 1y agoAnd then doubled down with a later Instagram post making fun of everyone. How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago>How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable. Voters are stupid?
- ryandrake 1y agoThey’re not stupid. These voters see government as a means to enact cruelty on outgroups they don’t like. That’s why they vote for cruel people who don’t care about hurting others. They are not stupid. They know exactly what they are voting for and are overwhelmingly supportive if it.
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- metalman 1y agoThere is a very large amount of redundency in enviromental data gathering and reporting, plus given.the most basic facts that it is impossible to close source the information source, and that there are now countless sensors on.earth and in orbit that can be re calibrated to provide conitiniousl'y consistent new data to older ongoing studies, there is essentialy nothing that can be effected by a political directive to actualy stop reporting, short of martial law, and then people would start printing pamphlets with potatoes and coffee dregs
- perrygeo 1y agoIf this administration doesn't want to do anything to solve climate change, that's their choice. It's a terrible choice, but it's in their power to do so. However, there's a huge difference between dismissing the severity of the evidence vs. going out of your way to hide evidence. The first is born of arrogance. The later is naked cowardice - they know exactly how wrong they are. If they wanted to project strength, they could simply leave the reports up and say "we don't care". Instead they scurry around behind the curtains trying to cover their tracks. Fucking pathetic.
- schmidtleonard 1y agoThey're still angry at Fauci for not going along with the world's dumbest coverup attempt in Feb 2020.
- zmgsabst 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmicgadget 1y agoThe non-cowardly thing to do would be to engage scientifically rather than memory hole the consensus. Or create the impossible requirement that a study have no bias.
- Hnrobert42 1y agoI'm not sure that's a fair argument. When social media takes down what it perceives as misinformation, the right uses the sunshine argument. "Leave it up and let the best argument win." In any event, just because you don't like the conclusion doesn't mean it is biased.
- zmgsabst 1y agoI was just pointing out the incorrect logic of the comment: If you believe they’re biased, removing them is removing false legitimacy from biased content — something the government has an interest in. And no different than a journal retracting a flawed paper. And since you want to discuss “fair argument”: there’s an obvious difference between allowing discourse on a public forum and publishing as an institution.
- userbinator 1y ago[flagged]
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoLike who, exactly? How many people have died by climate paranoia versus actual climate change?
- userbinator 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmicgadget 1y agoI guess some of us would prefer not to see our progeny living the Mad Max timeline.
- userbinator 1y ago[flagged]
- cosmicgadget 1y agoDo I need to explain the word 'progeny'? Your assumptions about my voting are as well-evidenced as your skepticism of science.
- userbinator 1y agoWhen doomsday predictions have not held true for decades, it's nothing but FUD to scare the population into increasingly authoritarian control. You should always be skeptical of science. That's why it's science and not religion. I thought we all learned that lesson in 2020.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
- EasyMark 1y agoIt's a real shame but at least there other nations still doing this work like China and various Euro countries. Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic. This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago> This belief that MAGA party has that the US can't do big things any longer and only corporations and broligarchs know how to lead us forward is just sad. Especially given the Musk/DOGE recent experience. Musk takes over Twitter, fires 40% of the workforce, and nothing much happens. Musk takes over the US Govt, fires <10% of the workforce, and things stop working. From this we should conclude, obviously, that the government is run much, much more efficiently and with less slack than any of the Big Tech organisations (who are also all busy laying off 10s of % of their workforces, apparently with no ill effect).
- gspetr 1y ago<From this we should conclude, obviously, I know of a software billionaire[0] who opened a pizzeria and failed. He said so himself. Should we conclude, obviously, that any break even pizzeria owner is a better businessman than tech billionaires? [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxAwUb86MUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxAwUb86MUE
- dspillett 1y ago> Sad to see the USA transition to a banana republic. I'm not sure banana republic is the best description of what is happening, the definition of the term only cover part of where things are heading. A comparison with NK seems more complete, especially given the current twits at the top, so I've taken to referring to the US as DPR-US.
- tialaramex 1y agoAn insistence - in spite of the reality - that you're a democracy seems likely prophetic. Right now though I think you can say the US is just back-sliding. Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani for I guess being very popular or something but he doesn't seem to have even attempted to actually do that. Once it's actually gone, Mamdani just gets imprisoned or executed so that Trump's preferred candidate "wins" regardless. The technology of democracy is still there, but the actual principles it supports are gone.
- Animats 1y agoBut Trump doesn't seem to have air conditioning on his golf carts yet.[1] So global warming can't be a big problem. [1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-golf-carts-secret-service-bedminster-b2779793.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
- graycat 1y agoTell me more: At my PC, the weather URL https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.90615740000004&lon=-84.01094719999998#.Xc_D3KLYV1I https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.90615740000... still works.
- esalman 1y agoNOAA released their budget estimate for FY 2026. Someone in our org ran it by copilot to summarize the impacts: * NOAA eliminates most climate, weather, and ocean labs and grants, causing major layoffs and loss of research capacity. * National climate research infrastructure is lost, with staff reductions. * Regional climate services, adaptation, and heat health programs end. * All climate research grants are cut. * Foundational ocean observation and Great Lakes research are terminated. * Sea Grant support for coastal resilience and aquaculture ends. * Aquaculture research and ocean science partnerships are stopped. * Funding for uncrewed systems R&D is eliminated. * Research computing for climate/ocean modeling is reduced or lost. * Many programs shift to operational focus (NOS/NWS), with layoffs in OAR. * Regional ocean observing systems and applied coastal research are ended, with grant losses and layoffs. * State coastal management, resilience, and estuarine reserve grants are terminated. * Support for coral reef grants and marine sanctuaries is reduced; no new sanctuaries. * Species/habitat research, salmon recovery, and habitat restoration programs are cut, with major layoffs. * Satellite/data services are reduced, with staff cuts. * NOAA Office of Education is closed; mission support staff reduced. * Overall, there is a major workforce reduction and elimination of many programs.
- ryandrake 1y agoBut look on the bright side: a relative handful of ultra-wealthy will pay slightly less in taxes. That’s got to count as positive news for them!
- 3D30497420 1y agoSpeed-running global warming with our eyes closed. Fun.
- rekabis 1y agoRight when warming has accelerated dramatically, too, such that we will see more warming in the next 10 years than we have in the last 40. Those cuts couldn’t have come at a better time. /s
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- alphadelphi 1y agowhen politics ban science you know things are messed up big time
- dspillett 1y agoFor those who prefer their news without pop-overs galore, autoplaying unrelated animation/video, requests to enable notifications with only yes/later options, claims to care about your privacy despite wanting to share your details with hundreds of other companies, etc.: https://archive.is/Tu51y https://archive.is/Tu51y
- jeroenhd 1y agoAs a non-American, the most painful thing about all of this is seeing how much the world has relied on America's charity for so long. Had other supposed economic powerhouses invested in their geographic and atmospheric science the same way the USA has, this would've been a rather annoying blip on the radar. We'd need to quickly get our backups out of storage and host them elsewhere, and go without American data points for a couple of years, but most things would be fine. Instead, it's now becoming clear how much just about any country but China, Russia, and Iran has relied on American scientific investments, and even those seem to freely incorporate American data when it's provided for free. I have no doubt that all of the atmospheric, oceanographic, and environmental science the American government has all been for strategic purposes, either directly providing information useful for the military of providing a believable excuse to install sensors all around the globe, some of which have been "enhanced". Still, as long as your country is friendly to the American regime, you were getting huge amounts of useful scientific data out of that deal, enough not to set up local alternatives. Here in the EU, scientists have been scrambling to safeguard data like this since the day of Trump's reelection, but it seems like governments here don't seem to be all that interested in funding any of the work the Americans have been doing.
- dspillett 1y agoRemember folks: if it keeps happening, just dig your head further into the sand.
- dgb23 1y agoThere are so many red flags with this administration that I lost count. Policing speech, suppressing information, cutting research funding, cutting social programs, increasing spending and intensity for deportations, deporting people for political affiliation, an unnecessarily disruptive economic policy and many reports of general incompetence, lying and corruption. It's all so bleak. Where is the payoff?
- lotsofpulp 1y agoThe new tax bill, which benefits asset owners (wealthy), older people, and the beneficiaries of the wealthy. When you have a population age histogram that is flattening and eventually an upside down triangle, you need some way of extracting labor from the young and giving it to the old (the chosen ones who can afford it) to maintain the socioeconomic hierarchy. The young without inheritances won’t ever have it as good, so you’ll need to distract them and otherwise fool them into believing it is their duty to transfer their earned income via earned income taxes to the elderly.
- epgui 1y agoRight, because that’s a “smart” way to tackle the demographic collapse/crisis while totally not making the problem worse.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoI don’t see a way to avoid population decline, assuming women have freedom and access to 100% effective birth control. The whole process of pregnancy/birth//breastfeeding/infant rearing sucks, so that most women will opt for 1 or 2, max. Then you have to account for all the men and women who opt to stay single (or queer or whatever). The number of women that need to have more than 2 kids to offset those with 0 and 1 will never happen. The only possible mechanism to align incentives is to remove all old age benefits and wealth transfers, so that one likely has to depend on their children. But even then, I doubt it would work.
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- throwawayoldie 1y agoThere, climate problem solved! /s
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- Havoc 1y agoAlso a methane sensing satellite just went awol. Probably coincidence though
- shirro 1y agoStill way too much capital in the US for now. If every US citizen with a post graduate qualification emigrated most of them aren't going to find better jobs. Better lives maybe. It is frustrating to see so much money from around the world invested in the US when it could be invested at home. Hopefully the current trends will change that.
- CHUCKZZZ 1y ago[flagged]