CLIMATEWIRE | Eight years ago, as the Trump administration was getting ready to take office for the first time, mathematician John Baez was making his own preparations.
Together with a small group of friends and colleagues, he was arranging to download large quantities of public climate data from federal websites in order to safely store them away. Then-President-elect Donald Trump had repeatedly denied the basic science of climate change and had begun nominating climate skeptics for cabinet posts. Baez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, was worried the information — everything from satellite data on global temperatures to ocean measurements of sea-level rise — might soon be destroyed.
His effort, known as the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, archived at least 30 terabytes of federal climate data by the end of 2017.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
In the end, it was an overprecaution.
The first Trump administration altered or deleted numerous federal web pages containing public-facing climate information, according to monitoring efforts by the nonprofit Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), which tracks changes on federal websites. But federal databases, containing vast stores of globally valuable climate information, remained largely intact through the end of Trump’s first term.
Yet as Trump prepares to take office again, scientists are growing more worried.
Federal datasets may be in bigger trouble this time than they were under the first Trump administration, they say. And they’re preparing to begin their archiving efforts anew.
“This time around we expect them to be much more strategic,” said Gretchen Gehrke, EDGI’s website monitoring program lead. “My guess is that they’ve learned their lessons.”
The Trump transition team didn’t respond to a request 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.
Scientists across the country raced to preserve federal climate data at the start of Trump’s first term, organizing efforts like the Data Refuge project at the University of Pennsylvania and the volunteer-led Climate Mirror. Even scientists from other countries got involved — the University of Toronto hosted at least one “guerrilla archiving event” in December 2016.
Some of these projects, like Azimuth, concluded once they’d achieved their archiving goals. Others, like EDGI, continued to organize and expand over the last eight years. And now they’re using the lessons they learned under the first Trump administration to prepare for the next one.
“That was a wild time and burned out a ton of people, so we’ve been preparing for this,” Gehrke said.
EDGI staff have been reaching out to other organizations, like the Environmental Protection Network and the Union of Concerned Scientists, for advice on what kinds of data to prioritize under the second Trump term. They’re also working on ways to ensure that scientists can access and use the archived datasets if they do disappear from federal websites.
“It does good to have the data — but if you don’t have a path into it or the support systems from people to actually use that data, its impact is limited,” Gehrke said.
‘More jeopardy’ under a second Trump term
Threats to federal data could have big consequences for global climate research. Researchers at federal agencies collect and maintain a vast array of local, national and global climate datasets, many of which are publicly available — and valuable — to scientists around the world.
NASA satellite missions collect data on global temperatures, sea-level rise, melting ice sheets, dwindling sea ice, clouds in the atmosphere, algae in the ocean and a huge variety of other climate variables. NOAA houses the National Weather Service, with its immense trove of weather-related data. It also collects information on a wide assortment of other environmental factors, including atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean temperatures, sea levels, climate-related disasters and other data, much of which is housed by the National Centers for Environmental Information.
THe Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, U.S. Geological Survey, EPA and other federal science agencies also collect their own climate and energy-related information.
Some of the major global datasets, like NASA’s estimates of global surface temperature changes, aren’t 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 confirm that their instruments are working and their datasets are accurate.
Some federal datasets are nearly irreplaceable. Hurricane Helene helped drive that fact home in September, when it flooded much of western North Carolina and temporarily knocked NOAA’s NCEI headquarters in Asheville offline. Scientists found they were unable to complete certain kinds of analyses until the databases were back up and running.
“One of the things we came across after Hurricane Helene swept through and caused devastation in Asheville, North Carolina, is we didn’t have access to all the NOAA data we needed to do these analyses,” said Daniel Gilford, a scientist with the nonprofit Climate Central, at a webinar on Tuesday announcing the findings of a new study examining the links between climate change and Atlantic hurricanes. “So we actually had to wait for the NCEI, the National Centers for Environmental lnformation, to come back online after Hurricane Helene.”
Shortly after Trump won the 2024 election, scientists took to social media platforms like Bluesky to begin discussing federal datasets that might be in jeopardy, pointing to agencies like NOAA and the EPA as likely starting places.
Much of the renewed concern about federal data stems from Project 2025, a 900-page conservative policy blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation that outlines recommendations for the next administration.
Project 2025 calls for major overhauls of some federal science agencies. It suggests that Trump should dismantle NOAA and calls for the next administration to “reshape” 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 will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”
A leaked video from the Project 2025 presidential transition project suggested that political appointees “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.”
Trump has previously distanced himself from Project 2025. In July, he wrote on the social media platform Truth Social that he knew “nothing about Project 2025,” did not know who was behind it and did not have anything to do with the plan.
But since winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump has picked several nominees for his new administration that are credited by name in the conservative policy plan, reviving fears that Project 2025 could influence his priorities.
Trump has also recently named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his new so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an external commission tasked with shrinking the federal government, restructuring federal agencies and cutting costs. The announcement has also ignited concerns about job security for federal scientists, including the researchers tasked with maintaining government datasets.
“There are lots and lots of signs that the Trump team is attempting to decapitate the government in the sense of firing lots of people,” said Baez, who co-founded the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project in 2016 and is currently a professor of the graduate division in the math department at University of California Riverside. “If they manage to do something like that, then these databases could be in more jeopardy.”
Though federal datasets remained largely untouched under the first Trump administration, other climate-related information on federal websites did change or disappear, Gehrke pointed out. EDGI documented about a 40 percent decline in the use of the term “climate change” across 13 federal agencies it monitored during the first term.
A better organized effort could result in more censoring under a second administration, she said.
While groups like EDGI are gearing up for their next efforts, Baez says he has no immediate plans to revamp the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project — although he hopes other groups will step up instead. One lesson he learned the first time is just how much data exists in the federal ecosystem and how much effort it takes to archive it, even with a dedicated group of volunteers.
“We got sort of a little bit burnt out by that process,” Baez said. “I’m hoping some younger generation of people picks up where we left off.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
