Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The Resistance: Protecting Scientific Data

Don't fuck with the geeks, man.  They've got the science and they will beat you with it.

Scientists have started copying United States climate data onto non-government servers out of fear that the data could disappear under Donald Trump's administration, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Trump has not said that he will delete data climate data from government servers. However, the President-elect has selected Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, and the transition team has asked for a list of the names of Energy Department staffers who were engaged in climate policy under the Obama administration.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Open Data Philly and Azavea, a software company, have met to discuss ways to preserve data currently made available to the public by the federal government, according to the Washington Post.

Researchers at the University of Toronto also held a "guerrilla archiving" event to preserve EPA data and scientists have used a Google spreadsheet to compile important datasets that need to be preserved and will set out to archive them for the public, according to the Post report.

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