EPA website removes climate science site from public view after two decades, Washington Post
“The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information. One of the websites that appeared to be gone had been cited to challenge statements made by the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt. Another provided detailed information on the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, including fact sheets about greenhouse gas emissions on the state and local levels and how different demographic groups were affected by such emissions. The changes came less than 24 hours before thousands of protesters were set to march in Washington and around the country in support of political action to push back against the Trump administration’s rollbacks of former president Barack Obama’s climate policies.”
I wonder if this would be the kind of data that folks were in a rush to copy and back up to private servers after the election?
Precisely.
Among other things, I believe so. Unfortunately, the next important step is to find a server to host it. Backing up the data is one thing, but people need to be able to access it.
Actually it appears from the story an archive version will be kept…
“The EPA’s extensive climate change website now redirects
to a page that says “this page is being updated” and that “we are
currently updating our website to reflect EPA’s priorities under the
leadership of President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.” It also links
to a full archive of how the page used to look on Jan. 19, before Trump’s inauguration.”
But the entire idea of the early web was it would be an alternative to official means of communication and indexing. Maybe this will spur this generation to return to that ideal.
Having access to the data is crucial to ensure accurate assessments since the IPCC goal is to limit the temperature increase to 2C, which means rich countries must phase out coal by 2030. This time, it was the climate change denying scientists who used the wrong satellite drift rate in their retrieval algorithm, incorrectly showing no warming.
For over a decade, the UAH data set did not match other data sets and others retrieving the same data. This disagreement enabled accusations of ‘manipulation’ (the reason to create ‘false news’). After comparing the various data, resolving discrepancies and stating, uncertainty, the critical assessment is to extract the human-caused global warming signal from other causes (volcanic, El Nino, solar activity, ..). Figure 1 and Table 1 of the link shows an almost startling observation after years of controversy: all the measurements, including UAH, now agree when non-human induced causes are filtered out. Figure 3 dynamically changes to show the raw and filtered data.
Based on the data, models now predict that the Earth will warm between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in the next century When global warming has happened at various times in the past two million years, it has taken the planet about 5,000 years to warm 4-7 deg C. The predicted rate of warming for the next century is at least 20 times faster. NASA sites specifically state that “scientists from all over the world have been collecting data on natural factors that influence climate—things like changes in the Sun’s brightness, major volcanic eruptions, and cycles such as El Niño and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. These observations have failed to show any long-term changes that could fully account for the recent, rapid warming of Earth’s temperature.”
Data measurements with various instruments, of the land, air, ice, and sea at various depths and altitudes help not just scientists but the general public assess climate change. In fact, allowing this data to be openly available allowed a few climate denying scientists to download and, incorrectly, convert the satellite data to show little to no cooling. Unfortunately, this extremely important exchange took over a decade.