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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Having backups is obviously always a good idea but that aside, how likely is it, that mirroring this data is actually necessary? There are obviously at least some people believing that it is necessary but then there are always people convinced that the most silly things are necessary. I am really unable to tell whether this is more of an overreaction or an urgent necessity, especially as someone not living in the US. Is the future just [perceived as] so unpredictable, that better safe than sorry is the right mindset?

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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

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.

Yes, they disagree with climate change which isn't even a debate in any other country. That's how insane things have gotten.

Why was this comment by ajmurmann flagged? Up to now that seems the best evidence provided for answering my question even though I think it is relatively weak evidence and it lacks a source for the second paragraph.

I didn't flag it, but I would guess that this is part of the reason:

"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).

It seems to me more like a technical detail whether you are no longer mentioning a topic because you removed it from the previous website or whether you replaced the whole website. In the end the topic is gone in both cases. You can admittedly draw somewhat different conclusions in both cases, in the former case they wanted to see the topic gone, in the later case they may just have forgotten to include the topic.

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.

"In the end the topic is gone in both cases."

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.

I didn't mean gone in that sense, I meant gone from the list of topics on the White House website, gone from the list of topics the government wants to be associated with if you want.

If you use the Wayback Machine you should be able to verify that the Obama website didn't have a page on climate (or on lgbt, for that matter) when he first took office - it took years to put one there.

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.

"Lessons learned under former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative who was accused of muzzling scientists during his term, initially energized a "race" to save the U.S. government's climate data. Activists also studied policy papers by members of Trump's transition team to get a sense of what might be at risk.

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...

If you only create redundancy when you are sure it's necessary, you're too late.

Of course and I think having those mirrors is a good thing, stuff disappears from the internet all the time. But that is not the question I am asking. We could have started mirroring climate data and all kinds of other data last year or five years ago, there is always a risk of losing data.

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.

The Trump administration has stated that all future EPA studies and communications will be subject to political examination before release. It isn't a huge leap to imagine that they might do this retroactively.

Probably not a realistic concern.

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.

The Harper government in Canada literally threw out decades worth of relevant data and historical records, removed websites, etc with little or no notice and (apparently) planning.

(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.

Given that we live in a new world of 'alternative facts' (Orwell would love that one) I think yes! Your concerns are very justified.

Thank you for the efforts. I do think it's important.

The specific problem is difficult to quantify: he's clearly anti-science and a loose cannon, and he's in control. Where a normal handover may include a brief news blackout during transition, this is all a bit Arbitrary Diktats Of Dear Leader and people are jumpy as heck.

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.

Ancient sysadmin cannot upvote this enough.

Think of it this way: servers cost money, bandwidth power costs money.

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"

I totally see how data could become unavailable, I am more asking whether it just really became more likely to happen. It is certainly no mistake not to rely on single sources, but if that is the motivation, then there is nothing special about now and climate data and mirroring all kinds of data would have been as good an idea a decade ago as now.

Besides redundancy, mirroring also helps spread the cost around. These groups tend to have pretty tight budgets.

Lots of copies keeps stuff safe.

This isn't about necessity. This is about sending a message.

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

I'd like to discuss a slightly different issue here.

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.

Why would you not? With storage costs being as minimal as they are I can't see a good argument not to store data that's under threat of deletion.

For [climate] models for example.

If some large number of those peer-reviewed journal articles' conclusions are (or appear to be) undermined by future discoveries having the raw data to confirm or refute such a development taking into consideration assumptions about the data that might have since changed or been proven incorrect seems like a pretty important thing.

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.

A contrived analogy for this might be something like "Why wouldn't you delete the data once you've rendered a graph of it in PNG?". Data is always important. Just as much so as it's original interpretation and constraints.

That is a bit like asking what you need source code for after having compiled the binary program.

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...)

Ah. Never thought of it that way, makes perfect sense. Thanks for the analogy.

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