NASA/NOAA Climate Scientists Fear Their Data Is At Risk
Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump, Washington Post
“Climate data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been politically vulnerable. When Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information, and his colleagues published a study in 2015 seeking to challenge the idea that there had been a global warming “slowdown” or “pause” during the 2000s, they relied, in significant part, on updates to NOAA’s ocean temperature data set, saying the data “do not support the notion of a global warming ‘hiatus.'” In response, the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee chair, Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.), tried to subpoena the scientists and their records.”
Keith’s note: Lamar Smith’s policy director throughout this period of subpoenas was Chris Shank who currently leads the Trump Transition Team effort at NASA.
OK, I realize it’s pedantic and picky. But “data” are plural. 🙂 Happy Holidays everyone.
Oh, I am with you!
G
Not to be pedantic, but that would be “data is plural”. 🙂 Grammatically speaking, the word itself is plural, but talking about the word would be singular, since we are talking about one word.
Personally I enjoys me a good pedantic rant.
What about the character “Data” in
Star Trek? Did he have to refer to himself as “we”?
Perhaps the word is used as a collective noun?
I agree — it’s like “group” or “bunch”. It’s arrogant to say “data are…”
OK, you win the pedantic contest. 🙂
I’ve got to run out and scribble out “less” and write in “fewer” on the Express Lanes at my local grocery.
Personally, I’ve accepted the usage of “data” as a singular noun. But I’m going to remain a die-hard on “media.”
The direction we are heading may not be recoverable. In the future do not expect your “way of life” to be even remotely similar to how it is or how you remember (i.e., imagine) it was. Human perception and memory of reality is a frail and fickle specter.
http://www.upworthy.com/a-s…
“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” — Carl Sagan
I haven’t seen a lot of skepticism being allowed to question the data. Dissenting voices are demonized. Data that doesn’t match, hidden.
For example, how accurate have global warming models been? What other factors could explain the results? How much effect does the sun and underwater heat sources effect ocean temperature?
I’ve heard that undersea heat sources have been discounted because thermal layers prevent the heat from rising. Has this been validated? I’ve also heard that undersea heating may be responsible for some polar ice melting.
Maybe much of this has been validated, but I haven’t seen much of an open discussion.
When have I “demonized” anyone? For that matter, who has anyone demonized? Most of us do our best to be objective.
My goal is to find the truth. I have carefully read any posts that asserted there was evidence that the Earth is not becoming warmer. Unfortunately those I have read contained obvious errors. For example, several postings cherry-pick the anomalously warm year 1998 as a starting point rather than 1997 or 1999. But today even this does not help; the past two years have been even hotter. Scan the entire curve:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tc….
A report by Remote Sensing Systems that temperatures had stopped rising based on satellite measurements was revised when they recognized that they had not allowed for orbital drift and the fact that the fraction of readings over land was increasing.
If you read even a few of the many papers published in this field you can examine the data for yourself and consider the depth of the scientific analysis. I think you will find that the vast majority of investigators are objective and unbiased, and that the evidence for a consistent increase in both atmospheric CO2 and mean global temperature is very strong and getting stronger each year.
You haven’t seen an open discussion because you are not looking in the right place, and you show a fundamental lack of basic knowledge (your undersea heat source comment did you in). I recommend reading “The Discovery of Global Warming” by Spencer Weart. He has a nice companion web site with lots of nice figures. After getting the basics here you can graduate to http://www.realclimate.org/. Plenty of discussion there and links to the data sets.
Enjoy!
G
Why dont you take the time to answer those questions for yourself instead of expecting others to hand feed you the information in a format you can easily digest? This lack of self initiated research and always bashing the work of others without substantive scientific exercise is one of the biggest problems in this world today. Do your own homework.
“Do your own homework”?! He already has, and has plenty of data, along with other scientists indicating that global warming is both real and human-caused. YOU sir need to do some homework and present some evidence (and rather compelling evidence IMHO) that it is not. And Faux News and denier websites don’t count.
Um, Im on the side of “indicating global warming” and the link just shows an interview with one of our great “fathers” of science and data. I think YOU, Sir, need to learn how to follow a conversation thread. Just saying.
Sad to say, Canada has already run the pilot project for this. http://www.macleans.ca/news…
I am curious. In private industry all data is regarded as the property of the corporation and it’s considered illegal and unethical to take it with you when you leave. Is it the same case with government owned data? Or are there very different laws governing it?
Very different laws apply. For scientific work, there are requirements to make the data publicly available and extra paperwork if you want to patent the design of a new instrument. For government employees, it’s basically all in the public domain, no copyright, no patent. For government contractors, it isn’t as absolute, but keeping things proprietary is discouraged. That’s for science. For hardware and engineering (e.g. developing a rocket), practices are more like private industry standards.
Regarding “For government employees, it’s basically all in the public domain, no copyright, no patent.” That’s true for copyright, but not for patentable inventions.
I stand corrected. If I understand it correctly, the government itself can’t patent something. I assume there are some restrictions on what government employees can patent (in the same way companies do, if the work was done on company time and with company resources.) I thought it was very restrictive, but I guess I’m wrong.
I consider my data to belong to the public. NASA has open data access policies. In some programs, if you do not post your data within a year of collection, you will risk loosing continuation of funding. I see the one year as time needed to do quality control and statistics, and not as a presumption ownership over a year.
So this data could simply be transferred to a private foundation or university since its public information. Probably a good idea anyway since the more servers its on the less likely it is to be loss.
I assume the one year also includes the embargo on data required by many publications for submitted articles.
Many of us don’t presume and embargo. My philosophy is that if someone scoops me with my own data, I deserve it. I often give data away before I have published, and my groups serves satellite data daily. No strings attached, I am a civil servant, my data are your data.
Now, I am not that concerned about data being lost. I am more concerned about continuing to collect data with future satellite missions.
G
I’m not sure what projects he works on, but I know how it works for planetary missions. The mission has a schedule for delivering data to the Planetary Data System archive. It’s usually phased, as in every six months delivering data taken from due date minus nine months to due date minus three months. On the scheduled date, the data becomes publicly available. Journals and their embargo policies are not involved. Although I suspect that, if it ever became an issue, a journal might rush its publication schedule to beat a public release deadline.
Anyone who has studied thermal design of satellites knows that the temperature of an object in space is determined by the visible absorptivity on the side facing the sun and the infrared emissivity on the side facing space. Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared and slows the cooling of the ground at night while being transparent to the sun’s rays. So we are changing the paint on our spaceship earth. It’s gonna get hot and people will suffer. Pretending that all the scientisits are lying about their data is as foolish as believing a real estate developer about what he is going to do.
Can someone explain how this isn’t a bit of an over-reaction?
How would one imagine data would be lost? By a new appointment-level administrator ordering data server farms wiped? Deleting backups? I can’t get a mental image of how that would happen. Even if it did TB drives are so widely available that copies would be trivial?
As someone says down thread isn’t the bigger issue collecting new data?
Government data is under the control of managers. If you lose your job your access to the government network is _immediately_ severed. As a physician I cannot even access patient data I entered at previous employers. The raw data in this case is massive (think: the Earth and its atmosphere over twenty years) and requires many terabyte drives. The investigators are now in a rush to find storage space and copy it.
They should torrent it.
Oddly, I recently came across a form of data corruption in an electronic copy science fiction novel. Some publisher decided that Ray Bardbury’s _The_Martian_Chronicles_ seemed absurd because it had the first manned Mars landing in 1999. So he shifted the dates forward by a few decades. So after-the-fact editing is both possible and made easier when data are stored in electronic media.
For scientific data, two concerns are authenticity and completeness.
Even with multiple copies of the data, in the hands of many different people, how do you know which is the “true” version? I’ve got a data set where, in processing, a software bug caused some of the time stamps to be misinterpreted. So some of the data are said to have been collected 256 seconds earlier than they actually were. When we fix that, and re-archive the data, what happens to people who already have copies of the old version? Who gets to keep track of which version is which, and makes sure people use the right one? So, were someone at NOAA to decide some modifications or recalibrations of climate data were appropriate, what happens to all the copies of the previous version which are floating around? Do we get papers which have to say, “this work is based on version 3.2.5 of the data”?
For completeness, it’s fairly common to either leave out or flag suspect data. There are always occasions when you know something wasn’t working (say, if an electrical fire started in your lab while the measurement was being made.) But it is a judgement call over what should just be tossed out, which should have a warning attached to it, and which should just be included as good data. So a different person might make a different choice.
Sounds like the sky is falling
It looks like Governor Jerry Brown is proposing to create its own space agency to continue climate research if NASA has to stop it. Perhaps it will also make a good backup for the data.
http://motherboard.vice.com…
California’s Hypothetical Plan to Start a Space Agency is Legal and Feasible
It is actually a good idea to let every state to have its own space agency. Then we will see some real competition.
Yep. Let’s have 50 programs like, say, Great Britain?
Ok, I am only talking about blue states, states that actually contribute to federal tax revenue, and hence are paying for the federal space programs. I don’t mind these states forming some kind of consortium, as long as republicans have no input we can expect progress. For the red states, they can stick their heads in the sand and celebrate their imaginary victory, who cares…
(Refusing to take the red/blue bait has tested me greatly:-) ).
I get (I think) where you are coming from: competition, and maybe a sense of de-Federalization being a good thing? A better way to use resources because the tax money is closer to home?
About the last thing we need in America is continuing Balkanization, a process that is well underway in a social sense but not at the level of political boundaries. Imagine NewYork/ New Jersey and a few close states get together for an initiative like this. California/ Oregon/ Washington, too.
Is that what you are imagining?
The very complex history of Balkans is not relevant to the US. All empires eventually break. It is the way history works: the tension within a large diverse country always build up to the breaking point. America was founded as a collection of states hence avoided the pitfalls of a over centralized government. There is nothing wrong keeping it that way. This doesn’t prevent states from collaborating with each other in areas of common interest, but there is no obligation to collaborate on things where no common interest exists. Under this principle, states have full rights to pursue collaboration in space science research independent of the federal government. I have no interest in politics of other things, but for research, this makes a lot of sense.
So it begins….
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
We have experienced a slow-motion coup over 40 years or so. Nothing less, nothing more; the country has been co-opted by the right. Witness North Carolina, where politicians favor power over patriotism.
…early stages of paranoia?
I look at them all the time. Anthony Watts is a lovely hoot. It’s foolish to ignore the fools in my opinion.