Will Trump ‘Disappear’ Environment, Climate Data?

EJ TransitionWatch: Will Trump ‘Disappear’ Environment, Climate Data?

By Joseph A. Davis

Will vast troves of environmental data be at risk of deletion under the second Trump administration — like a modern-day burning of the library at Alexandria?

You may remember that as the first Trump takeover in 2017 approached, environmental workers of many stripes scrambled to make copies of everything. They even organized a group to do it: the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. EDGI still exists. It still does good work.

NOAA supercomputers have archived all the recorded measurements of the Earth’s surface temperature in history. Photo: NOAA News via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).

At the time, the biggest threat to Trump 1.0’s fossil fuel backers may have been the informative and persuasive climate change website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It made (and documented) the case for climate action.

And, yes, it did go away pretty quickly after the Trump team took over the EPA. They called it an “update.”

And, yes, there followed four years of devastation in federal climate and environmental programs.

But the data and the web pages never really went away. Because every four years, at inauguration, the EPA makes and publishes a “snapshot” of most of its website. Here’s the one from Jan. 19, 2017, the day before the last Trump administration moved into the White House.

The EPA website is only a teensy fraction of all the EPA data — much less all the federal environmental data. (Reporter’s Toolbox recently noted the possible threat from Hurricane Helene to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate data in Asheville, North Carolina. That data went down for a few days, but was soon back online.)

 

NOAA climate data in crosshairs

Still, Austyn Gaffney of The New York Times did a notable piece this month raising the question of whether Trump 2.0 could or would do away with NOAA’s climate data. 

As well she might. The concern was raised by language in the Trumpian Project 2025, suggesting he should disassemble NOAA and scatter it to the winds. Project 2025 called NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” 

Trump tried to distance himself from the project during the campaign, but we will see what he does now.

Among the data in NOAA’s archives is not only the daily measurements of weather at thousands of stations across the U.S. — but all the recorded measurements of the Earth’s surface temperature in history. 

That’s literally the evidence that eventually proved that human-made climate change is really happening. Scientifically.

 

Backups and big computers

So if Trump deleted all data about the global mean surface temperature (as it’s called) would climate change no longer be proven?

No. Scientists have made several copies. You can find one at the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre. It has really big computers.

All these backups aside, there are others. Leslie Katz wrote for Forbes recently about the End of Term Web Archive, a Silicon Valley citizen project to save government web content.

 

Even if Trump tries to disappear

all the data that undermines

his policies, he can’t do it.

 

So even if Trump tries to disappear all the data that undermines his policies, he can’t do it.

Put it this way: It’s always smart to save early and often. Reporters slaving over a past-deadline story have known as much, or learn it quickly once they face the Blue Screen of Death.

Yes, we think the data will be safe. The bigger risk is that people will not use it, understand it or heed it. 

But it never hurts to make a backup.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

---

* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 43. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.