Can I be the first to claim that the people running the mirror are changing the data for their own nefarious purposes?
Not that I believe this or anything, but come on - you know that accusation is going to go around. It might make sense to use a remote server to timestamp files as they're uploaded, or something like that.
Ultimately still comes down to trust. Still better to have a backup of data that MIGHT be poisoned vs not having it at all. If we have multiple copies from the original source we should be able to determine if somethings been messed with.
I would say the same thing. Do you think you will really convince a climate denier with this data that you copied off of the Internet that, was copied from a gov server, on to another server and then torrented and copied to another server and then downloaded onto you PC... doubt it.
>Do you think you will really convince a climate denier with this data
These people where convinced a pizza restaurant was the center of a global pedo ring based on nothing but deliberately misconstrued sentences they claim are code.
I still suspect something will come out about that. It may be that "honey pot" operation the FBI was running got misconstrued, but I still bet there is some grain of truth to what was uncovered because all the other issues brought up by "anonymous FBI" pretty much came true, so that means it was someone on the inside feeding basically rumors from that organization, most of which were corroborated.
It's worth noting that not everyone who rebuffs some of the proposed actions is a climate denier. There's still some question as to the extent of human involvement. That said, smog is enough for me to be in favor of working towards renewable, less polluting energy sources. In my lifetime I've gone from having allergy-like flare ups once every few years, to now 2-3 times a year, mostly seems to follow the pollution levels not just the pollen count.
By the same token, not every "green" program is a great thing... and even in treaties, exempting the worst actors (China, India) because they are often considered third world doesn't do a lot to help the global issues. Improved working requirements as a requisite for international trade deals would go a long way towards "cleaning up."
I bring this up, as I tend to see a lot of people who question the approach, intensity, and cost getting lumped in with climate deniers.
Not OP but the general complaint is that we shouldn't switch from a cheap energy source (coal) to expensive renewables which are relatively untested at scale if the human impact of climate change is minimal or already past the point of no return. I don't personally believe this but this is a not unreasonable argument I have heard.
Contribution to climate change shouldn't be the only criteria for evaluation of an energy source. Shouldn't we also keep in mind pollution? Coal burns, it releases fine particulates into the air that cause cancer in people's lungs. Pollution sucks. We should stop talking about climate change and go back to the 70s when people were talking about pollution.
Yeah, I agree with you - there a many many reasons why we should get off fossil fuels and reduce our energy consumption beyond climate change. I was just giving an example of about the most reasonable sounding excuse for inaction in this area. Regardless of one's political views there are plenty of solutions that appeal to the full breadth of the political system but the primary thing that they can't address is oil and gas company's desire to protect quarterly growth, people's misplaced political reasoning (I'm against action because the left is for it type arguments) and the fact that some people just don't like change that may indicate the way they have previously been doing something is wrong.
I completely agree... I mainly mean that some resources are less of an impact or more cost effective than others. I'm all for working to reduce pollution for the sake of, and if that means less carbon in the air, awesome. However, if your goal is really reducing some footprints then what materials are used/needed for construction and distribution have a huge impact. Not to mention the infrastructure security of potentially key infrastructure (power grid) relying on parts from an adversarial foreign state.
I'm not against trying to replace high polluting resources like coal... I am saying, that perhaps the investment in public solar grids make a lot less sense in many areas, and there is a relatively big impact in mining the materials and shipping the panels, many of which come from China, which is bad about clean build, not to mention shipping itself.
Likewise, trying to push for electric cars doesn't make a lot of sense in that the environmental impact of an electric car takes 5+ years to outweigh that of a gas car, not counting how the electricity is generated. Also, not accounting for the overall impact of replacing said batteries, or other maintenance.
And yes, cost is another issue... depending on what is the replacing technology, there are other cost-benefit analysis that should be done on a case by case bases against the larger impact. I also feel that if we take the premise at reducing pollution, vs. "omg the world is going to die" kind of reactionism it's a bit easier to sell more broadly to conservatives.
Fighting/reducing pollution should be enough of a goal by itself, a large enough portion of the population lives in large enough cities to understand smog and feel it when breathing, some cities far worse than others. The broader (saving the world) mentality doesn't do much on its' own, is much harder to sell, and too big.
This. Although I don't think your allergy flare-ups have a direct causation there--it could just be you're aging. There's ten million variables.
I'm tired of the whole "you're a denier" shibboleth--there very well may be very strong negative human impact on the climate. I'm sure there is. Whether it is global is another question and whether it is stoppable is yet another. But what I most disgusted by is how the issue is used as a political weapon to basically implement a far left, collectivist agenda worldwide. It's like the old-school soviets found a new angle on justifying their desire for total control over populations. It will not stand.
How successful is the effort to convince clinate deniers as of right now? I see this as an archival effort. If the source is destroyed, this data, among everything else being archived, will still be around and publicly accessible by anyone who wants to use for any purpose. That is inherently important. That said, once the first part is well taken care of I'm a big advocate for building more refined systems for storing and verifying the information.
I work for a digital archives project and we're concerned about similar issues of provenance. Our way of dealing with this has been to structure our archives as JSON-formatted text in Git repositories, with binaries managed by git-annex.
Git uses hashes for everything: files are placed in .git/objects/ by their hash, each commit lists the hashes of files in the working directory, and each commit points to the hash(es) of its parent(s)
Using Git it's possible to verify the integrity of the entire repository and its history, making it impossible to tamper with without leaving traces. It's also possible to have multiple copies (clones) of the data and to verify that they are exactly the same.
If you have a copy of such a collection you can compare it against a copy held by the originating institution. If that becomes impossible for some reason, then if you can track down any of the original files you could prove that that portion of the data is correct, which lends trust to the rest of the collection.
Of course, it's possible this would not convince a die-hard trump supporter. /s
When there is a broad consensus across the scientific community about climate change, does it even matter at this point if the data has been changed? The U.S isn't the only country that collects this data. So even if changed, it doesn't matter.
> When there is a broad consensus across the scientific community about climate change, does it even matter at this point if the data has been changed?
There's more to climate science than the yes/no of whether climate change is a thing. We don't just need to know it's happening--we want to know details of how to model it, what different inputs have what affects, what the feedback loops are and how strong they are, how they and other effects interact...
> The U.S isn't the only country that collects this data. So even if changed, it doesn't matter.
Many countries collect data, but presumably the sets of data collected differ, and more data is better. Losing a large subset of our climate data would hurt advances in climate modeling.
> When there is a broad consensus across the scientific community about climate change, does it even matter at this point if the data has been changed?
It does if the data that was changed is the data that was used to support the consensus.
More generally, all data collected by research that is funded by taxpayers should be collected, cryptographically signed and verified, and archived where any taxpayer can see it. I have never understood why that is not already standard operating procedure.
Usually around IP incentives as part of the grant, in order to further entice applicants. This is taken further by pressure from educational institutions and their researchers to file for patents against said research.
I'm not saying it's right, and agree with you. But often there's a lot of entropy with the status quo, and to the seated incumbents in a space.
Does this carry over to federal agencies as well? I know the state of access to journals and papers published by universities is a shitshow but don't know how it is at the government level.
Actually it really does matter. The US collects far more of this data than anybody else and archives far more of it.
Losing that collection or archive would be a disaster for science and a loss for all of humanity. Destroying that data would be reminiscent of ISIS destroying relics in Palmyra except that destroying that data jeopardizes our future.
We know already that CO2 and other gases cause climate change and we understand the mechanism. I think that most of us would probably also agree that the earth is a sufficiently complex system that predicting accurately what effects we will see when is impossible. We expect to see more droughts, bigger storms and rising sea levels - but we can't really predict very accurately how big those things will be when. By the time we have accurate models it will be too late.
We know that we need to act now. Understanding climate change is not the most important research out there; what's important is developing technologies and industries to reduce our emissions. That research would be what I fear losing.
But "we need to act now" can lead to a lot of ineffective policies and practices that won't lead to the most impacting outcomes long term. I think reciprocal clean working environments as part of trade negotiations could go farther than a lot of the attempts so far. I also feel that no participating country should be exempt, beyond a reasonable grace period (2-3 years).
It's also worth considering the impact of some movements... as an example, there's significant impact in creating/shipping and replacing batteries on a large scale. It may not make as much sense compared to more efficient engines, and even additional looks at other engine techniques.
I find pollution relatively abhorrent on its' own though... recently driving through west Louisianan/east Texas and my initial thoughts as to the painful to breath air there was how can this be allowed to persist. I have mixed feelings all around, I just don't want to spend a lot of taxpayer money on ill-advised and lesser impacting processes. We do too much of that already.
There was once "broad consensus" that the world was flat. I am not at all comfortable when there is so much consensus. There needs to be debate, disagreement, and healthy skepticism at all times.
I would argue that there has never really been a "broad consensus" that the world was flat, since before the greeks. Most of the notable greek philosophers believed that the earth was a ball/sphere.
Not that I believe this or anything, but come on - you know that accusation is going to go around. It might make sense to use a remote server to timestamp files as they're uploaded, or something like that.