Scientists "frantically" backing up climate information archives in case Trump wipes them

Wow!.

A worthwhile book to read if anyone wants more on the history here is, Merchants of Doubt, by science historians, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. What is especially interesting is the fact the marketers of doubt began with the tobacco companies fighting the science connecting cigarettes and second hand smoke to cancer. Once the actual science settled the matter, the same people involved took their expertise to new industries profiting from science denial.

One fight these same characters waged was against labeling aspirin as a risk to children because of Reye's Syndrome. The fiction book, The Doubt Factory (YA) by the best selling author, Paolo Bacigalupi, took on the aspirin labeling issue as part of the story line. That made me look into it further. It's estimated 1,500 hundred children died from Reye's syndrome between the time medical researchers suspected the connection with aspirin and when the FDA finally required labeling kid's aspirin and educating the public. The aspirin industry promoted scientific doubt for 5 years.

And then there was global warming science discrediting:

Scientific American: Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago

Frontline: Steve Coll: How Exxon Shaped the Climate Debate

Rex Tillerson and Exxon Spent Big on Climate Change Denial while Misleading Public, Evidence Shows

Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump's likely choice to be America's top diplomat as Secretary of State, has spent years funding climate change denial and underwriting efforts to block measures to address climate change while misleading the public, according to evidence compiled by the Center for Media and Democracy.

As CMD detailed in a joint complaint filed with the IRS shortly before the election, Exxon has used the American Legislative Exchange Council "as a key asset in its explicit campaign to sow uncertainty about climate science, undermine international climate treaties and block legislation to reduce emissions."

This includes attacks on the Clean Power Plan which sets out modest steps to try to mitigate the devastating effects of climate change being caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

CMD reviewed thousands of pages of evidence obtained through open records requests, original research, and public financial documents to detail how under Rex Tillerson's leadership Exxon used a charity, ALEC, to advance legislation of direct benefit to the company.

According to CMD's evidence, over a 17-year period, Exxon and its foundation spent more than $1.7 million to finance lobbying activity by ALEC as a charitable tax write-off. Tillerson has been the CEO of Exxon for 12 of those years.

As noted by Eric Havian, a partner at the law form of Constantine Cannon who specializes in tax law, CMD's evidence shows that Exxon has used "ALEC's charitable status to fuel its disinformation campaign on climate change, so taxpayers are literally paying Exxon to lie to them."

Click to expand...

ExxonMobil gave millions to climate-denying lawmakers despite pledge


But to end on a positive note:
This is encouraging: Energy Department refuses to give Trump team names of people who worked on climate change. My apologies if it was posted elsewhere.

I saw this headline earlier but hadn't read the article. Fascinating. Thanks for posting the snippets.

I am not a lawyer, but I do have some knowledge of public government data, how it is stored, and what can be released.

I suspect that anything releasable under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) could be copied to a publicly accessible server (something like Wikileaks) without any penalty. Copying anything protected by the Privacy Act data, confidential business information, or anything withholdable under the 9 exemptions from FOIA could incur repercussions. Of course anything classified would be a no no to post too. I am not sure of the status of data collected by univeristy scientists working under cooperative agreements, but paid by the government. I'm sure most of the climate data was collected in this way, as was the data the Univ. Penn scientist quoted mentioned.

My mind boggles at the herculean task of scrubbing government servers of "climate data." First, what are "climate data"? If some entomologist mapped the distribution of glassy winged sharpshooters in cotton fields over time, would that be climate data? It could show that the distribution moved northward and could be correlated to changing temperatures. Add to that, study plans, agreements, progress reports, raw data, statistical analyses, and final reports are not collected and stored in any systematic way. They are spread out over millions of folders in shared drives, on hard drives, and in file cabinets. Even under formal Good Laboratory Practices the data, associated metadata, and other documents are scattered all over the place. If an office of some sort complied with a dictate to delete all collected data, it would only be able to do so to the data under its direct control and that data it could find, even without copies existing offline. Plus, and published studies are out there. Forced retractions won't do much (shoot, Jan Hendrik Schoen is still getting cited by poor unfortunates, as well as by bloggers and in non-reviewed publications!).

I'm not trying to say everything is peachy keen, but surely the scientists themselves know how hard it would be to scrub their data. I wonder how many are actually doing it?

Now, "dismantling federal climate research programs" is much more likely simply by defunding the programs. This can be done at various levels, all the way from Congress through appropriated programs, and by others down the chain who can divert discretionary funds or those secured through reimbursable agreements from other agencies.

So they're desperately trying to save all that data that got phonied up by the University of East Anglia a while back and the NOAA base data that NASA "adjusted". The unaltered NOAA data is readily available from a number of servers that copied everything over the years, but no one else chose to copy the "adjusted" data.

King Neptune said:

So they're desperately trying to save all that data that got phonied up by the University of East Anglia a while back and the NOAA base data that NASA "adjusted". The unaltered NOAA data is readily available from a number of servers that copied everything over the years, but no one else chose to copy the "adjusted" data.

Click to expand...

Dearie me. We have a senator who says things like that. Mind you, he's a Sovereign Citizen who doesn't understand the term 'empirical evidence', so is widely regarded as the epitome of the Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump does decide to destroy data, or at least make it unavailable. Over the past few years our [Australian] government has been entrenched in climate denial, because they are in thrall to the Far Right and fossil fuel interests. Public opinion has forced them to roll back some of their destructive decisions. Sometimes they say something sensible, only to retract it a few hours out of fear for their positions within the Coalition. Imagine if there weren't the same restrictions on government activity.

Helix said:

Dearie me. We have a senator who says things like that. Mind you, he's a Sovereign Citizen who doesn't understand the term 'empirical evidence', so is widely regarded as the epitome of the Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Anyway, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Trump does decide to destroy data, or at least make it unavailable. Over the past few years our [Australian] government has been entrenched in climate denial, because they are in thrall to the Far Right and fossil fuel interests. Public opinion has forced them to roll back some of their destructive decisions. Sometimes they say something sensible, only to retract it a few hours out of fear for their positions within the Coalition. Imagine if there weren't the same restrictions on government activity.

Click to expand...

I don't know about the rest of the world, but the U.S. data is so widely dispersed that it couldn't be destroyed. But the adjusted data probably could be deleted from all of the servers that anyone would think to use. It's probably easier to readjust the data as needed, than to worry about what NASA did mess with, but I don't know what they did with the funy data at the University of East Anglia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy

King Neptune said:

So they're desperately trying to save all that data that got phonied up by the University of East Anglia a while back and the NOAA base data that NASA "adjusted". The unaltered NOAA data is readily available from a number of servers that copied everything over the years, but no one else chose to copy the "adjusted" data.

Click to expand...

I recall this faux scandal made up of a few cherry picked lines from almost 2,000 hacked emails. Took me a second to track down the story.

Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents....

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

Click to expand...

Nature: Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

This is like the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. The number of people that would have to be in on either conspiracy, considering all the worldwide research from so many different sources of researchers, would be staggering.

MaeZe said:

I recall this faux scandal made up of a few cherry picked lines from almost 2,000 hacked emails. Took me a second to track down the story.

Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

Nature: Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

This is like the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories. The number of people that would have to be in on either conspiracy, considering all the worldwide research from so many different sources of researchers, would be staggering.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I found also. I recall the researchers having been warned to clean up how they handled some things, and to label files more carefully, butt apparently there was no deliberate alteration of data.

That reminds me of something else that I have to check.

King Neptune said:

Yes, that's what I found also. I recall the researchers having been warned to clean up how they handled some things, and to label files more carefully, butt apparently there was no deliberate alteration of data.

That reminds me of something else that I have to check.

Click to expand...

Which leaves post #4 a complete mystery to me.