Climate wire | Eight years ago, as the Trump administration was preparing to take office for the first time, mathematician John Baez was making preparations of his own.
He and a small group of friends and colleagues had arranged to download and securely store large amounts of public climate data from federal government websites. At the time, President-elect Donald Trump had repeatedly denied the basic science of climate change and had begun appointing climate change skeptics to cabinet positions. Baez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, worries that everything from satellite data on global temperatures to ocean measurements of sea level rise could soon be destroyed.
His effort, known as the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, archived at least 30 terabytes of federal weather data by the end of 2017.
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As it turns out, it was an excess of caution.
The first Trump administration changed or removed numerous federal webpages containing public climate information, according to monitoring efforts by the nonprofit Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), which tracks changes to federal websites. But the federal database, which contains vast amounts of globally valuable climate information, remained largely intact until the end of President Trump’s first term.
But as Trump prepares to take office again, scientists are growing concerned.
They say federal data sets could face bigger problems this time than they did under the first Trump administration. And they are preparing to start anew with their archive efforts.
“We expect it to be more strategic this time,” said Gretchen Gehrke, EDGI’s website monitoring program director. “My guess is they learned their lesson.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
Like Baez’s Azimuth project, EDGI was born in 2016 in response to Trump’s first election. They weren’t the only ones.
At the beginning of President Trump’s first term, scientists across the country rushed to preserve federal climate data, organizing efforts such as the University of Pennsylvania’s Data Protection Project and the volunteer-led Climate Mirror. Scientists from other countries also participated, and the University of Toronto hosted at least one “guerrilla archive event” in December 2016.
Some of these projects, such as Azimuth, were terminated once they met their archiving goals. Other organizations, like EDGI, continued to organize and expand over the past eight years. And now they are preparing for the next administration with the lessons they learned under the first Trump administration.
“We’ve been preparing for this because it was a tough time and a lot of people were burnt out,” Gehrke said.
EDGI staff has reached out to other organizations, including the Environmental Protection Network and the Union of Concerned Scientists, for advice on what kinds of data should be prioritized under President Trump’s second term. We are also working on ways to ensure that scientists can access and use archived datasets even if they disappear from federal websites.
“It’s good to have data, but without access to the data and a support system from people to actually use that data, the impact is limited,” Gehrke says.
Trump’s second term will bring ‘more crisis’
Threats to federal data could have a major impact on global climate research. Federal agency researchers collect and maintain vast local, national, and global climate datasets, many of which are valuable and available to scientists around the world.
NASA’s satellite missions collect data about Earth’s temperature, sea level rise, melting ice sheets, loss of sea ice, clouds in the atmosphere, algae in the oceans, and a wide variety of other climate variables. NOAA has the National Weather Service, which stores vast amounts of weather-related data. We also collect a wide range of information on other environmental factors, such as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean temperatures, sea levels, climate-related disasters and other data, much of which is housed at the National Center for Environmental Information. .
The Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, EPA, and other federal scientific agencies also collect their own climate and energy-related information.
Some of the major global datasets, such as NASA’s estimates of Earth’s surface temperature change, are not the only ones of this kind. Other scientific institutions around the world use similar methods to collect the same information. However, having multiple datasets from independent research groups helps scientists ensure that the instruments work and that the datasets are accurate.
Some federal datasets are nearly non-fungible. Hurricane Helen drove home that fact in September, flooding much of western North Carolina and temporarily crippled NOAA’s NCEI headquarters in Asheville. Scientists have found that certain types of analysis cannot be completed until the database is backed up and running.
“One of the things we faced after Hurricane Helen hit and devastated Asheville, North Carolina, was that we didn’t have access to all the NOAA data that we needed to do these analyses. “That’s true,” said scientist Daniel Guilford. The nonprofit organization Climate Central announced in a webinar Tuesday the results of a new study examining the link between climate change and Atlantic hurricanes. “So we actually had to wait until the NCEI (National Center for Environmental Information) came back online after Hurricane Helen.”
Immediately after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, scientists began using social media platforms such as BlueSky to discuss federal datasets that may be at risk, perhaps as a starting point. He cited agencies such as NOAA and EPA.
Many of the new concerns about federal data stem 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 a major overhaul of some federal science agencies. President Trump has suggested NOAA should be dismantled and is calling on the incoming administration to “reimagine” the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research on climate and the environment.
The plan also suggests that “the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism requires a government-wide rollback.”
A leaked video from the presidential transition project Project 2025 suggested that political appointees “must completely eradicate all references to climate change from all locations.”
President Trump has previously distanced himself from Project 2025, but in July he told the social media platform Truth Social that he knew “nothing about Project 2025,” didn’t know who was behind it, and didn’t know what the plan was. I wrote that it had nothing to do with it.
But since winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump has selected several candidates for his new administration whose names are on conservative policy plans, making Project 2025 a priority for Trump. There are renewed concerns that it may have an impact.
President Trump recently named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami to lead the so-called 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 job security for federal scientists, including those tasked with maintaining government data sets.
Baez, who co-founded the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project in 2016 and is now a professor at the university, said: “There are signs that the Trump team is trying to decapitate the government in terms of firing a lot of people.” There are a lot of them,” he said. Graduate Division of the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside. “If they were able to do something like that, these databases could be further compromised.”
While federal data sets remained largely untouched during the first Trump administration, other climate-related information on federal websites has changed or disappeared, Gehrke said. EDGI documented an approximately 40 percent decline in the use of the term “climate change” across the 13 federal agencies it monitored during the first period.
He said censorship could become even stronger under a second administration if more systematic efforts are made.
While groups like EDGI are gearing up for their next efforts, Baez says there are no immediate plans to revamp the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, but he hopes other groups can take on the project instead. He said he was looking forward to it. One of the first lessons he learned was how much data existed in the federal ecosystem and how much work it would take to archive it, even with a group of dedicated volunteers. That’s what it means.
“We kind of got burnt out a little bit in the process,” Baez said. “I hope the younger generation will continue where we left off.”
Reprinted from E&E News Published with permission of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides news that matters to energy and environment professionals.
