It's good that there are organized efforts to copy and save reams of scientific climate change data and materials accumulated by federal agencies which Donald Trump is turning over to climate change deniers who could easily hit "Delete, all."
Longer look, here:
Scroll down this 2012 blog posting about what the Wisconsin DNR had had posted under former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, and hit these links to see that most are now either fully deleted, take you nowhere or are barebones summaries:
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.I have no doubt that fossil fuel interests will make climate change information disappear from federal websites after January 20th; after all, that kind of ideological scrubbing happened in Wisconsin - - something noted in this national report about efforts to save the record:
It wasn’t just Bush—anti-environment politicians such as Stephen Harper in Canada and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker have muzzled and censored scientists, as well as made government data less accessible from websites. Journalist James Rowen has been keeping an exhaustive blog about Walker’s war on the environment.I've noted several times on this blog that GOP Gov. Scott Walker's 'chamber of commerce mentality' Department of Natural Resources, and corporate allies across state government, have downgraded science generally and actions aimed at climate change and scrubbed multiple links and data bases from the agency's webpages.
Longer look, here:
Scroll down this 2012 blog posting about what the Wisconsin DNR had had posted under former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, and hit these links to see that most are now either fully deleted, take you nowhere or are barebones summaries:
Let's begin with the agency's main Climate Change page, under "Currently in our State,' where you find three short bulleted entries with citations to information released in 2010 or early 2011, including a link to a key Legislative Council Study pdf since removed from the website, and a line about a Jim Doyle task force that produced bill never brought to a vote in the Legislature. The page does not indicate when it was last updated.
So "Currently" is a bit oxymoronic. Read on...
The Basics page was last updated January 14, 2010.This scrubbing is why I regularly urge people to copy from these state sites what of value there is, given the Walker propensity to sanitize:
The Climate Trends page was last updated May 11, 2010.
The Impacts page was last updated January 19, 2010.
The Adaptations page was last updated February 14, 2011.
I always urge people to read the DNR's webpage on The Public Trust Doctrine. The legal concept dates in the US to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 - - predating the Wisconsin Constitution and statehood here - - and back to Roman times. Such is the importance to people of open access to water.
Here is the DNR webpage on its website, and I will also copy out the text - - (some graphics may not reproduce, like links to videos, but go to the page and access them) - - because I fear the information will be scrubbed away, as was the agency's climate change content once Walker replaced Gov. Doyle.
