Scientists are copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
The theory most consistent with Trump's actions is that his climate change-is-a-hoax rhetoric was designed to gather votes.
Now that he's in power and seeking favour from oil barons, destruction of evidence of climate change advances their agenda of externalizing it to future generations and poor countries.
> I really doubt anyone is going to "delete" any data, instead they will stop getting funding to store it, run the servers, etc.
Canada has a history of deleting inconvenient data. For example (quick google search):
[1] http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/the-harper-government-has-tra...
[2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/watchdogs-inves...
[3] http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were...
[4] http://aptn.ca/news/2013/05/01/ottawa-fears-admission-it-pur...
With 20/20 hindsight, some other countries should probably have replicated all of U.S. data collection and research into climate change.
> 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?
He doesn't actually believe it is a hoax. That would be ridiculous.
> 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.
In either case the data would have to be backed up. And no, it doesn't work like that.
It's irresponsible to disregard all of that for a vague notion of "mission creep".
You are imposing your own standards on NASA and concluding they are mishandling funds because of it. The objection isn't that mission creep exists in places, but that it is wholly inappropriate as an argument for eliminating NASA from conducting climate research.
To me it seems like planetary-level data gathering and exploration is exactly what NASAs mission is. Running analysis platforms on the closest available planet seems like an eminently reasonable way to iterate on system design.
I hate to sound like I’m agreeing with Trump on .. pretty much anything. But if we can hand NOAA’s tasks to NOAA, the airforce’s tasks to the airforce, commercialize “routine” orbital access - and free NASA up for actual exploration .. I don’t think I’d be opposed to that. Just as long as we’re actually enabling them (and funding them) to do so, and not actually downsizing any of the above.
Edit: that's actually a list made up by meteorologist Eric Holthaus, however AT is grabbing it as well.
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.
That said it doesn't justify what the Soviets did.
because Eugene Koonin is a highly respected geneticist (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".
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=ac...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is what Trump said:
"That includes canceling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations"