Saving U.S. Climate and Environmental Data Before It Goes Away
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
I am glad there are organizations willing to save this data and I hope these 4 years will put an end to this MAGA craziness.
The damage being done is generational. The next administration can and should bring back the websites and data, but that's just the first step of a very very long road.
There is another parallel example - Munich 1938 agreement to appease Hitler, with current 'negotiations' and push at all cost to stop russian aggression on Ukraine and appease puttin' (which doesn't care about war that much, he has his own goals which look like russian borders everywhere where Ukrainian currently are).
To appease aggressor to avoid bigger war which was anyway inevitable. There is this famous saying "We had the choice between war or shame, we have chosen shame, and we will get war too".
Finland "appeased" Stalin by giving up Karelia and wasn't invaded even though it was no NATO member until 2022.
Greece "appeased" Turkey by giving up parts of Cyprus.
Ireland "appeased" the UK by giving up Northern Ireland.
No serious historian buys the domino theory (countries being invaded one after another) with respect to Ukraine. Even Stephen Kotkin, a Ukraine war hawk, has complained about the Munich analogy.
This is a gross mischaracterization. NI was created as part of the partitioning of Ireland (1920), carried out at a time when the UK government in Westminster also controlled all of the island. In 1922, Ireland became an independent country, and at no time after that was it at war with the UK.
There was a violent resistance to UK rule in Ireland (particularly leading up to 1921) but there was no recognized national actor negotiating with the UK. The eventual outcome could be seen as a victory for Sinn Fein, but this was not a pair of national actors at war and reaching an agreement to stop fighting. It was more a resistance movement which eventually won some of what it wanted (an independent Ireland) but not all (Ireland did not cover the entire island).
So - it's like asking why Willie Sutton robbed banks.
(Plus - if you were a violent, drunken barbarian, already having the time of your life raping & looting - then what could possibly make things even better? Yes! - a giant fire!!)
Or - any time you've got a nasty cultural conflict, and libraries are near-and-dear to just one side - yes, obviously the other side will go after 'em. Ask an old Playground Monitor whether verbal bullies shuffle through various subjects & words, searching for whatever will get the worst emotional reaction from their victim.
(However much it mashes some people's buttons, I suspect that going after libraries for very calculated, 1984-ish reasons is relatively rare. If your side has effective control of the police and media, then maybe 0.01% of the population really cares that some dusty old book proves your current propaganda to be a lie.)
This is a popular saying but it is not really true. In an open and free society like western societies (at least some still) are, history is the domain of historians and not the state.
For example how could the plight of native Americans be anyone’s concern if the state controlled all history?
So yes, the victors like to rewrite history but we should be conscious of the fact that most of the history we read is actually pretty accurate and well founded, not simple propaganda.
Of course that might well be about to change in the US.
We need a new league of Enlightenment-driven countries that share resources, technology and defense. And they should have objective 21 first century criteria to accept and keep members.
Edit: typo.
Vs. hard reality is that a silent army of unsung (and usually ill-paid) librarians and engineers has to keep working every single day, forever, to actually preserve and serve up that cornucopia. With maybe 0.01% of the utopians ever willing to lift a finger to help them.
If you care enough to help a bit - buy a pair of decent-quality, multi-TB external hard drives, set 'em up as a RAID mirror, and slowly fill 'em with downloaded data that you think should be preserved for 10 to 1000 years. Preferably two different brands of drive, a fs that detects bit rot, and checking at least annually that the data is still good. When you get old, try to pass the drives (or their successors) on to two younger people who care.
And if you are serving up any sort of data that you think should be preserved, long-term? Then make sure it's easy to get in a format that will be easily read in the more-distant future. Not just something cool or proprietary, that might as well be Voynich-ese a century from now.
But if historians have 5 different accounts of the Battle of Bosworth Field, or 7 copies of an Edict issued by Pope Gregory II, or ...
From a quick check, this includes data.gov that the article mentions, as well as www.ncei.noaa.gov ("National Centers for Environmental Information")
From the article:
> we began reaching out and working with partners, eventually coming to call ourselves the Public Environmental Data Partners
...ArchiveTeam has many years of experience scraping and hundreds of people running the Warrior system to contribute data. So much so that they rate limit some of the projects (client-side) to avoid overloading them accidentally. Seems weird not to partner with an organization that will publicly share the data with everyone and is happy to help out, rather than setting up a custom thing that I somehow don't trust to survive the first decade
If you want to help with this effort, see the Warrior's wiki page: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior It's a VM image that you can run on any computer or laptop
It does remind me of the strategy five years ago of “can’t have any cases if you don’t test!”
The infrastructure to deliver a copy of the data to everyone that wants it does not exist, not even close. Rationing is achieved by making data hard to find and gatekeeping. Some nominally public data is effectively too large to copy but there are very limited resources to work with it in place. Every time an administration changes out, this gets slightly rearranged and some data is prioritized and other de-prioritized but the underlying issue remains.
There is also a lot of institutional reluctance to make public data actually available because of risk of "misuse", which mostly means doing analysis they don't want you to do with it. I got into a fight with USGS over access to a nominally public data set during the first Obama administration over this issue. Both Democrat and Republican administrations have a habit of wanting to control the narrative that can be spun with the raw data which makes it a bit of a political football.
Which is to say, all of this is a side effect of practical data policy in the US government not being very good. The fact that there are hundreds of exabytes of this data makes it more than a policy challenge.
They get started with DEI, climate change and vaccines, which are all issues that a lot of people on the right care about, and that have a somewhat negligible influence on most people's lives. So people get used to data being deleted. But what happens when that kind of crap hits the justice system, or worse: the election results?
This is the scariest shit.