KLIMAWIRE | Eight years ago, as the Trump administration first prepared to take office, mathematician John Baez was making his preparations.
Along with a small group of friends and colleagues, he was organizing to download large amounts of public climate data from federal websites for safekeeping. Then-President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly denied the basic science of climate change and began appointing climate skeptics to cabinet positions. Baez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, worried that information—from satellite data on global temperature to ocean measurements of sea level rise—could soon be destroyed.
His effort, known as Azimuth Climate Data Backup Projectarchived at least 30 terabytes of federal climate data by the end of 2017.
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In the end, it was over-prevention.
The first Trump administration changed or deleted numerous federal web pages containing public climate information, according to the monitoring efforts of the nonprofit Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which tracks changes to federal web sites. But the federal databases, which contain vast repositories of valuable climate information around the world, remained intact at the end of Trump’s first term.
However, as Trump prepares to take office again, scientists are increasingly worried.
Federal data sets may be in bigger trouble this time than they were under the first Trump administration, they say. And they are preparing to resume filing efforts.
“We hope to be much more strategic this time,” said Gretchen Gehrke, EDGI’s website monitoring program manager. “My guess is they’ve learned their lessons.”
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Like Baez’s Azimuth project, EDGI was born in 2016 in response to Trump’s first election. They were not the only ones.
Scientists across the country raced to preserve federal climate data early in Trump’s first term, organizing efforts like Data Refuge project University of Pennsylvania and run by volunteers Climate Mirror. Scientists from other countries also participated — the University of Toronto hosted at least one.guerrilla archive event“In December 2016.
Some of these projects, such as Azimuth, ended when they reached their archiving goals. Others, like EDGI, continued to organize and expand in the last eight years. And now they are using the lessons learned during the first Trump administration to prepare for the next one.
“It was a wild time and it burned a bunch of people, so we’ve been preparing for that,” Gehrke said.
EDGI staff have reached out to other organizations, such as the Environmental Protection Network and the Union of Concerned Scientists, for advice on what types of data to prioritize in a second Trump term. They are also working on ways to ensure that scientists can access and use archived data sets if they disappear from federal websites.
“It’s good to have data, but if you don’t have the means or the support system of people to actually use that data, its impact is limited,” Gehrke said.
“More risks” in a second Trump term
Threats to federal data could have far-reaching consequences for global climate research. Researchers at federal agencies collect and maintain vast amounts of local, national, and global climate data, much of which is publicly available and valuable to scientists around the world.
NASA satellite missions collect data on global temperature, sea level rise, ice sheet melting, sea ice loss, atmospheric clouds, ocean algae, and many climate variables. NOAA is home to the National Weather Service, with a wealth of weather-related data. It also includes information on many other environmental factors, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean temperature, sea level, climate-related disasters, and other data, much of which is collected by the National Center for Environmental Information.
The Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the US Geological Survey, the EPA, and other federal science agencies also collect information related to climate and energy.
Some of the major global data sets, such as NASA’s estimates of surface temperature changes, are not the only ones of their kind. Other science agencies around the world collect the same information using similar methods. But having multiple datasets from independent research groups helps scientists verify that their tools are working and that their datasets are accurate.
Some federal data sets are almost irreplaceable. Hurricane Helene helped drive that point home in September, when it flooded much of western North Carolina and temporarily knocked NOAA’s NCEI headquarters in Asheville offline. The scientists found that some types of analysis could not be completed until the databases were restarted.
“One of the things we found after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc and devastation in Asheville, North Carolina, is that we didn’t have access to all the NOAA data we needed to do these analyses,” said Daniel Gilford, the scientist. The non-profit Climate Central announced the findings of a new study in a webinar on Tuesday. links between climate change and Atlantic hurricanes. “So we had to wait for NCEI, the National Center for Environmental Information, to come back online after Hurricane Helene.”
Shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, scientists took to social media platforms like Bluesky to start discussing federal data sets that might be at risk, with agencies like NOAA and the EPA likely to be the starting point.
Much of the renewed concern about federal data stems from Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy blueprint led by the Heritage Foundation that outlines recommendations for the next administration.
Project 2025 calls for major overhauls of several federal science agencies. Trump suggests that NOAA should be disbanded and calls on the next administration to “reshape” the US Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate and the environment.
The plan also suggests that “the Administration’s climate fanaticism will require the release of the entire government.”
A leaked video From the presidential transition project Project 2025, he suggested that political nominations “will have to completely eliminate references to climate change”.
Trump has previously distanced himself from Project 2025. In July, he wrote on the Truth Social platform that he knew about it. “There is nothing about Project 2025” he didn’t know who was behind it and had nothing to do with the plan.
But since winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump has chosen several candidates for his new administration who are credited by name on the conservative policy agenda, rekindling fears that Project 2025 could affect his priorities.
Trump recently appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his new Department of Government Efficiency, an outside commission tasked with shrinking the federal government, restructuring federal agencies and cutting costs. The announcement also raised concerns about the job security of federal scientists, including researchers responsible for maintaining government data sets.
“There are many, many signs that the Trump team is trying to take down the government in the sense of firing a lot of people,” said Baez, who founded the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project in 2016 and is now a professor. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Riverside. “If they manage to do something like this, those databases could be at greater risk.”
Although federal datasets were previously untouched by the Trump administration, other climate-related information on federal websites had changed or disappeared, Gehrke noted. EDGI documented about a 40 percent decline in the use of the term “climate change” across the 13 federal agencies it monitored during its first term.
A better organized effort could result in more censorship in a second administration, he said.
As groups like EDGI prepare for their next efforts, Baez says he has no immediate plans to revamp the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, though he hopes other groups will step up. One lesson he learned the first time is how much data exists in the federal ecosystem and how much effort it takes to archive it, even with a dedicated team of volunteers.
“We got a little burned out on that process,” Baez said. “I hope one of the younger generations picks up where we left off.”
Reprinted E&E News Courtesy of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environmental professionals.
