Saving Government Climate Data: NASAWatch on PBS NewsHour

Keith Cowing, editor of NASAWatch appeared tonight in a PBS NewsHour segment titled How scientists are scrambling to safeguard vital environmental data (video link)

“MILES O’BRIEN: While scientists wait to see what shoes might drop, a rumor mill echoes across the Twitterverse

Most agencies are laying low, avoiding controversy in public channels. The EPA’s last official tweet was the day before the inauguration.

Meanwhile, alternative, or rogue, accounts emerge constantly, some apparently authored by worried employees inside agencies, others by sympathetic, connected outsiders. They are flares from a science community under siege.

Are scientists in a panic? Is that what it is? What’s going on?

KEITH COWING, NASA Watch: They know where the panic button is, and they look at it once or twice a day.

MILES O’BRIEN: Keith Cowing is a former NASA biologist who founded the watchdog Web site NASA Watch 20 years ago. He’s the proto-rogue, and now he says everybody seems to be joining in.

KEITH COWING: Nobody has said, shut that database down, take that off your Web site. But what’s going to happen when you have got this giant, bubbling, simmering social media crowd, and they go from being worried about things that might happen to things that are happening? There’s a colossal hair trigger waiting out there.”