Mirroring US climate data
climatemirror.org
climatemirror.org
More info at the wiki: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Ftp-gov
Ftp-gov-grab: https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ftp-gov-grab
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EFF, or some organization with more longevity than a single consultant should build something similar.
It timestamps to Bitcoin, and you don't need to own any Bitcoin for it to work.
BBC does this, and it's freaking annoying.
News media won't even mention your so-called 'real facts', facebook and twitter might not let others see them. Before you know it you'll be denounced by your neighbours, work colleagues and friends as a traitor, a madman. You'll lose your job, or your partner will. There may be a show trial and public denunciation. This has all happened before: the USSR, McCarthy.
If you don't want that you need an alternate means of distributing real facts, and countering fake ones. It has to be hosted so deeply in our tech infrastructure that it can't be firewalled or jammed. It needs to be accessible covertly. And it needs to record all the alternative facts too, because they like to change their facts.
Let's call it Samizdat.
There's a portion of the population who's wanted to deny climate change for a long time and I believe they'll accept the alt-facts to justify their position. But I'm skeptical about the efficacy of successfully silencing existing news groups and the majority of scientists.
Has anything like that ever been successful in the connected world? That being said, we do absolutely need to make protect our internet from censorship.
Example: a few years back a uk submarine was stuck high aground. As the tide went out the prop was exposed. I and a billion other people saw it live on bbc news. (Blue poly fins, at least 10 inside a housing). Good luck trying to find that image now. It has been sucessfully removed. The internet isnt the great memory well we all want it to be. With effort, facts can be changed, events scrubbed.
Change and censorship aren't synonymous and I have no expectation that anything will last forever. But it's easier to ignore and forget about something like a television show than something like global climate change.
My post was in relation to the mass censorship required to create a world like the parent post described.
As for your submarine, that's interesting. Was it this one? http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-116053... I'm not doubting the ability to censor things, especially before they become widespread, but climate change will be much harder because it's already a part of our vocabulary.
1: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
3: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-de...
The Trump campaign paid this group millions of dollars beginning in the summer of 2016.
Second result for me when searching Google Image Search for "bbc uk stuck submarine."
The full story involves a dilema between forcing the boat off the ground, and risk stripping its super-secret rubber coatings that might then be collected by russian agents, or letting the tide go out and expose the prop to the media.
But you're right, censorship happens. How do we prevent it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kin...
I'd be interested to see if anyone can drag up an archive of that video.
EDIT: Might be this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgX4OYIFl-c but doesn't contain any view of the propellor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute-class_submarine#Propuls...
[2] http://www.shipwrecklog.com/log/2010/10/h-m-s-astute-aground...
Propulsion tech was part of the accident because, i believe, these subs do not have rudders. They vector thrust like a jetski and therefore have issues when moving slowly.
The chilling effect can be very real, and I think you'd be surprised how quickly it can take hold. And Harper was an absolute pussycat compared to Trump.
> There was once "broad consensus" that the world was flat. I am not at all comfortable when there is so much consensus. There needs to be debate, disagreement, and healthy skepticism at all times.
The key point is that the flat earthers kept believing (and angrily counter-attacking) despite the solid evidence to the contrary. Post-positivism is not claiming that everything is subjective and bias is insurmountable. You're not being sceptical, just delusional.
Not that I believe this or anything, but come on - you know that accusation is going to go around. It might make sense to use a remote server to timestamp files as they're uploaded, or something like that.
Losing that collection or archive would be a disaster for science and a loss for all of humanity. Destroying that data would be reminiscent of ISIS destroying relics in Palmyra except that destroying that data jeopardizes our future.
We know already that CO2 and other gases cause climate change and we understand the mechanism. I think that most of us would probably also agree that the earth is a sufficiently complex system that predicting accurately what effects we will see when is impossible. We expect to see more droughts, bigger storms and rising sea levels - but we can't really predict very accurately how big those things will be when. By the time we have accurate models it will be too late.
We know that we need to act now. Understanding climate change is not the most important research out there; what's important is developing technologies and industries to reduce our emissions. That research would be what I fear losing.
It's also worth considering the impact of some movements... as an example, there's significant impact in creating/shipping and replacing batteries on a large scale. It may not make as much sense compared to more efficient engines, and even additional looks at other engine techniques.
I find pollution relatively abhorrent on its' own though... recently driving through west Louisianan/east Texas and my initial thoughts as to the painful to breath air there was how can this be allowed to persist. I have mixed feelings all around, I just don't want to spend a lot of taxpayer money on ill-advised and lesser impacting processes. We do too much of that already.
There's more to climate science than the yes/no of whether climate change is a thing. We don't just need to know it's happening--we want to know details of how to model it, what different inputs have what affects, what the feedback loops are and how strong they are, how they and other effects interact...
> The U.S isn't the only country that collects this data. So even if changed, it doesn't matter.
Many countries collect data, but presumably the sets of data collected differ, and more data is better. Losing a large subset of our climate data would hurt advances in climate modeling.
It does if the data that was changed is the data that was used to support the consensus.
More generally, all data collected by research that is funded by taxpayers should be collected, cryptographically signed and verified, and archived where any taxpayer can see it. I have never understood why that is not already standard operating procedure.
I'm not saying it's right, and agree with you. But often there's a lot of entropy with the status quo, and to the seated incumbents in a space.
Ultimately still comes down to trust. Still better to have a backup of data that MIGHT be poisoned vs not having it at all. If we have multiple copies from the original source we should be able to determine if somethings been messed with.
By the same token, not every "green" program is a great thing... and even in treaties, exempting the worst actors (China, India) because they are often considered third world doesn't do a lot to help the global issues. Improved working requirements as a requisite for international trade deals would go a long way towards "cleaning up."
I bring this up, as I tend to see a lot of people who question the approach, intensity, and cost getting lumped in with climate deniers.
Likewise, trying to push for electric cars doesn't make a lot of sense in that the environmental impact of an electric car takes 5+ years to outweigh that of a gas car, not counting how the electricity is generated. Also, not accounting for the overall impact of replacing said batteries, or other maintenance.
And yes, cost is another issue... depending on what is the replacing technology, there are other cost-benefit analysis that should be done on a case by case bases against the larger impact. I also feel that if we take the premise at reducing pollution, vs. "omg the world is going to die" kind of reactionism it's a bit easier to sell more broadly to conservatives.
Fighting/reducing pollution should be enough of a goal by itself, a large enough portion of the population lives in large enough cities to understand smog and feel it when breathing, some cities far worse than others. The broader (saving the world) mentality doesn't do much on its' own, is much harder to sell, and too big.
I'm tired of the whole "you're a denier" shibboleth--there very well may be very strong negative human impact on the climate. I'm sure there is. Whether it is global is another question and whether it is stoppable is yet another. But what I most disgusted by is how the issue is used as a political weapon to basically implement a far left, collectivist agenda worldwide. It's like the old-school soviets found a new angle on justifying their desire for total control over populations. It will not stand.
These people where convinced a pizza restaurant was the center of a global pedo ring based on nothing but deliberately misconstrued sentences they claim are code.
They'll believe whatever they want.
(I think I'm being a smartass, btw. I think.)
Git uses hashes for everything: files are placed in .git/objects/ by their hash, each commit lists the hashes of files in the working directory, and each commit points to the hash(es) of its parent(s)
Using Git it's possible to verify the integrity of the entire repository and its history, making it impossible to tamper with without leaving traces. It's also possible to have multiple copies (clones) of the data and to verify that they are exactly the same.
If you have a copy of such a collection you can compare it against a copy held by the originating institution. If that becomes impossible for some reason, then if you can track down any of the original files you could prove that that portion of the data is correct, which lends trust to the rest of the collection.
Of course, it's possible this would not convince a die-hard trump supporter. /s
When your budget is cut, servers will shut down at some point in the future. It isn't a "the gov says rm -rf everything"
But this has obviously been triggered by the Trump presidency and is focused on climate data which implies that people are now more concerned than before and especially about one specific kind of data. Now I would like to know whether or not this elevated level of concern is justified.
But.
Lots of things seem to be in motion now that many people said could never possibly happen. An actual executive order on building a wall on the US/Mexico border. Government agencies unconventionally being silenced -- even if a presidential gag order on government agencies makes sense and should be allowed in certain conditions, these present conditions are nothing if not hostile.
So it seems like this administration is proving that it doesn't care about convention, or if it comes off as aggressive and hostile towards the ideals it objects to.
So... still probably not a justified fear, but we're closer to a reality where it is justifiable than we ever thought possible.
(e.g. http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/vanishing-canada-why-were...) Not a great link but gives an overview.
These things can happen - trusting individual federal governments to maintain sane policies towards national data handling is unfortunately a poor bet.
I would like to know whether or not this elevated level of concern is justified.
Thank you for the efforts. I do think it's important.
Data resilience in the case of a rogue executive is an unusual thing to come across, but it can't be unique. Executives change, and organization data needs to persist beyond the current board.
They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...
They replaced the old website with a new website. The old website is stored in: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ This is usual. Obama toke the same measure. Here is the Bush website if you like it: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
With the change, Trump (technical staff) removed many subject they disagree, and many subjects they agree with. If Obama had a page about how great are ginger hair people, it would have disappeared too.
Aren't there already a plethora of peer-reviewed journal articles on the issue of climate change? Why is it still necessary to store the presumably raw data?
Even my high school geography notes have an abundance of information on the issue of climate change (for and against). So I doubt if this is necessary at all.
What is in your high school geography notes was dictated in part by political decisions about school curriculum - you cannot assume that the future of even high school geography notes will match your experience.
Just like you have new versions of a program building on changes to source code, you can run newer and improved analysis on the scientific data (whether to see if you get the same result, a new additional insight or whatever).
Journal papers are often no better than having the binary (or perhaps more accurately the stdout dump of running the binary...)
Well the EPA had been asked by Trump's transition team to provide a list of employees who have attended conferences about climate change. See NPR story: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505041927/....
They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website and we now many Republicans don't believe in man made climate change. So I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. We are talking about a administration that thinks that getting coal out of the ground like it's 1910 is the future...
"They have also removed all mentions of climate change from the white House website "
As gus_massa points out above, the entire Obama White House website (not just the pages dealing with climate change) has been transferred to the National Archives (not "removed") and has been replaced with a completely new site.
While the web is still new enough that it's hard to argue tradition, Obama did the same thing to Bush II's site, and Bush II did the same thing to Clinton's site (Clinton was the first, so there's no data before that).
Anyway flagging the comment seems a needless harsh reaction, reply with a comment pointing out the facts or maybe downvote it if you really believe the comment was made in bad faith.
No, it isn't. It went to the National Archives, where it is still available in its original form.
The same thing happened and/or will happen with all the other records of the Obama presidency.
Administrations tend to put up a page at whitehouse.com on issue X when they want to trumpet or otherwise refer to what the administration has DONE about issue X. Since Trump just got elected, he hasn't done anything noteworthy on climate, so there's no page describing what he's done - speeches he's given, bills he's signed, etcetera. Since there's no such page, there's no such topic. Simple as that.
The topics there now seems to be cut-and-paste from his campaign site; it's essentially a placeholder to be filled out later.
But what they have witnessed so far has been "unprecedented," Murphy said, and "much more intense and publicly celebrated" than the precedent set in Canada.
"The transition team and Trump administration are very upfront and promoting of this plan; it's not that this is surreptitious," Murphy said."
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/trump-officials-suspe...
Message to Scientists - we value your work
Message to the World - we are not all bad
Message to future generations - we are not hopeless
Message to Trump - good day sir
Literally no one in the administration has even suggested, ever, that they'd delete climate data.
Here is the closest article I could find: http://www.salon.com/2016/11/23/politicizing-climate-change-...
Second, NOAA is not operationally or logistically equipped to handle the level of earth science that NASA is performing. NOAA manages a few weather satellites, but has nowhere near the infrastructure that NASA has, and requires, to manage the existing earth science research. Even if you gave NOAA the appropriate money, they don't have the infra or engineers to keep everything flying.
Planetary Radio did a great episode on this topic, but I'm struggling to find it right now.
* note - i support bailing on TPP, H1B visa reform, and subsidizing clean energy
Of course, its not like this political atmosphere would listen to any budget justifications. It's all theater now, it doesn't matter what actual justifications there are, what actual facts there are, or what things actually look like when you spend the time to dive into them. What matters these days is a small number of opinion-makers feel in their hearts, and what they tell their followers to feel with quick one-sentence justifications.
When we get rid of NOAA you can forget about Hurricane warnings... and since they are probably "alternative facts" you can let people die... or alternatively they "go to heaven". How about, you can't have good predictive models of future events, if you don't know how to model or you don't use the "big data" of past events.
Oh, but the "big bucks" are in climate change? That must be what they do in Silicon Valley and Manhattan? /snark>
> We face immediate and compelling needs for better protection of life and property from natural hazards, and for a better understanding of the total environment-an understanding which will enable us more effectively to monitor and predict its actions, and ultimately, perhaps to exercise some degree of control over them.
> [...]
> I expect it to maintain continuing and close liaison with the new Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality as part of an effort to ensure that environmental questions are dealt with in their totality and that they benefit from the full range of the government's technical and human resources.
- http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2575&
This clearly covers climate change, there's no mission creep.
How many "bucks" do you think that "climate change" gets vs. other possible science??
The "real money", is in the SSI, benefits, health and human services. If Trump attacks those programs with the same enthusiasm as the (foolishly) politicized environmental ones, that will be interesting.
Obviously it's annoying when Trump saves 500 jobs or shaves $100 million off the budget and celebrates like he's just saved the economy, but honestly I'd much rather have him do that than try to make a tremendous deal to privatize social security or something.
Provide a mailing address to which to send hard drives.
(When I say "metadata", I refer to the data sources, methods of the data acquisition and so on. When a scientific field is politicised it is not only hard to trust the models but even the data, so I think the metadata are very important, if they are available.)
What is left to do to have truly open computation? * somewhat-to completely free computational power?: CircleCI, Travis CI, whatever * open source repositories to run code from?: Github hooks and others * trusting trust? * open hardware? * decentralized websites?
Unfortunately it will probably take a huge scandal that baldly and stupidly shows how unchecked those powers are and what can be possible with them. I think Trump is capable of that kind of misstep. Like say SNL writers were PMing each other a tasteless joke about assassinating Trump and the president tweets about it and orders their arrest.
In the end, something dramatic like that could actually have a really positive effect on the consciousness of the public. It could also have a really negative effect where people accept the new normal. It's hard to know.
Left leaning people will not accept any science generated under a Right leaning government
and as we already know Right leaning people find it hard to trust the science coming from a Left leaning government.
This is about the fear of losing scientific data that has already been produced.
But the subtext is that any 'discoveries' or 'corrections' will be rejected out of hand.
The prime ones being the recent corrections to the land temperature record that cooled the 1930s and 1940s and heated 2009 onwards yielding a steady linear increase graphic.
When those corrections are placed under the microscope and likely reversed, what will the reaction be ? Scientific shills of the Republicans are making up Alternative Facts... here is our precious archived dataset that true believers can reference.
[edit] the difference is that it's not the administration or even the EPA that is putting it's reputation on the line if the data was manipulated, but the individual scientists themselves. No one with any sense believes that a scientist is going to fall on their sword and ruin their career just to make up some BS talking point that Trump can run with.