I'm glad someone managed to save the data that we all payed for.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
The site wasn't (isn't) about the data. It's about articles that contextualize the data. The money raised has allowed them to stand up a new site with all the old articles (which truth be told were all still nominally accessible via the internet archive) and will help fund them to create new ones. So it will stay relevant by paying the people who in the past worked for NOAA to creation the content, to now create the content paid for by donation.
Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
Anything the US government publishes directly is in the public domain, including the contents of climate.gov, when it was online. One of the reasons the migration could happen without legal repercussions is precisely because the information was public domain.
From the article:
> This is possible because US government data is public domain by law.
From the FAQ on the new climate.us [0]:
> Can I re-use this data/product/image/video?
> Yes! Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain can be freely re-used with proper attribution.
> Any content after June 30, 2025 and credited to Climate.us, is under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
> Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain [and] can be freely re-used with proper attribution.
What a bizarre thing to say. It's in the public domain. Why would you need attribution?
I don't think this is what's going on here but CC0 was expressly created because not every jurisdiction had a concept of "public domain", so a special license was needed to make sure it acted as if it were in the public domain for those cases.
From a CC0 FAQ [0]:
> Do I have to attribute the person who applied CC0 to their work?
> No, there is no legal requirement that you attribute the affirmer ...
From a Berlin Universities Publishing FAQ [1]:
> ... Since a waiver of copyright protection is not possible under German copyright law, CC0 is equivalent to a waiver of all possible rights and legal claims by the creator.
But, regardless, public domain or CC0 doesn't need attribution whether it's in the US or Germany.
This is still privatizing a service so the government does not need to pay for it.
Is the oldest trick in science. Do it for free. We are looking for: "enthusiastic", "volunteer","vocational", "young", "exploitable". We'll pay cancer research with this nice charity event...
Every single scientist has heard this crap thousands of times, and the independent climate council should bill those conservative politicians for their job. Each time they need something for them. If not they will never learn to not mess with science.
What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
It's difficult to make money if you have to spend all the money on defense lawyers.
Once Trump dies of natural causes I assume some intrepid journalists will go through the mountain of evidence and dig out some exciting snippets of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe a few more people will have to resign because of it.
I'd be interested to hear the contrast between what the Trump Presidential Library considers his greatest accomplishments and what, say, Bob Woodward writes.
I do remember when they went on and on about how the Democrats and Jews were all Satanic pedophiles and then they elected the King of all pedophiles to stop it. And then they objectively interfered with good faith efforts to police sex abuse for years with false flags and conspiracy nonsense like trying to find a secret entrance to Hillary Clinton's child sex slave dungeon under a pizzeria with a shotgun, and declaring all transgender people "groomers."
A broken clock may be right twice a day, but when it is, it doesn't deserve credit for being a good clock.
Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
Its called legal or mandatory deposit. In some countries their national library is required to crawl the open internet within their language, besides collecting regular published materials. In the US laws on legal deposit has not been extended to non printed materials.
Your argument assumes the Trump admin wants to actually help the citizens it is supposed to represent. They do not care about most citizens, their words and actions have proven this over and over again.
This admin absolutely will never take any steps towards transparency, education, sharing, or even simple kindness. Any hope of implementing something like this will have to come later.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
No no, the snide response works because this shutdown was a violation of aforementioned system. Downstream discussions on “oh hurrr ummm how do we decide what’s worth spending money on?!” are irrelevant. We already have a system to do that, and that system has decided to fund climate.gov
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
I work in this space. The load on private APIs -- and the management costs in general of reselling government data -- are utterly dwarfed by the upstream costs borne by the government.
The public __already__ pays for Google, The Weather Company, Apple, and really __everybody__ -- down to your local weather person and surf report -- to use weather data on a massive scale.
Government weather data underpins huge chunks of our modern, globalized economy. It should absolutely be better funded and even allowed to directly distribute data to the public and industry. NOAA and NASA et al could be given 10x their current allocation of tax money and you and I would still be getting a great deal.
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.
In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.
This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
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If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.
This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
This was my thought on the issue as well. How does moving it to private companies benefit anyone except the companies (who can now legally price gouge)? This is a centralized service, and just like healthcare, the numbers show that integrity goes out the window once financialized.
do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)
Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
is there like a list of things that government is responsible for, or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
> is there like a list of things that government is responsible for
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
You're not wrong, but I would like to point out that there is also the Civilian Weather Observer Program (CWOP) that is fed by a lot of private weather stations (the kind you can buy at Walmart of Amazon and put at your house). I believe the data is aggregated and averaged to account for variations in installation deficiencies, and used to inform/enhance the government maintained data feeds.
We have good weather data because of satellites, and there are plenty of private weather sats.
The classical US ground station network is actually run by volunteers and has been seriously degrading in quality over time. Its data was identified as corrupted and useless for climatology decades ago, which is what led to the US CRN being built. Other countries however did not do an equivalent, and their networks are still very low quality. Most of the UK's network, for example, is considered unusable for climate monitoring under WMO standards (but they are still used regardless!).
I respect cynicism and questioning stuff but this is misplaced. You have to trust the government since they are potentially the least partisan source here. Yes the data can be misconstrued by legislators but the truth of the data cannot be in question. It’s healthy to question it but the solution is to require proof of non-sabotage. It takes a lot of money and resources to pull this data together. It’s compiled by organizations across the world and being the trustworthy anchor is the most efficient way to achieve this. With that the government agency has every incentive to be non partisan and operate with integrity.
"The courts" writ large are doing just fine. SCOTUS in particular is a cesspool, but that is not the typical situation at all.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
I agree with your feelings but 'activists and independent scientists' do not have the resources to maintain that sort of infrastructure over the long term and will also be continually fending off attacks on their credibility. Institutions exist because volunteering has limitations.
Hard disagree. Public funds are absolutely for funding research into things that affect the public on a large scale. That's the whole point. What could be more "general welfare", as envisioned in the constitution, than making sure we are not screwing up our collective home?
I think you meant to address this to someone else? I was saying it's not practical to leave it up to people volunteering, with all the uncertainty and unreliability of funding that that implies.
This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.
Congress abdicated the majority of their authority to the executive over time by creating executive agencies. Now everybody is upset because the executive is actually using the power that Congress gave to it. The primary check on government growth is the three branches contending for power. No branch wants another branch to become more powerful and make their branch irrelevant. So, to fix the current issue, Congress can remove the power it has given to the executive and restore balance.
Disagree. The primary check on the government is consequences for violating the law and the constitution. That's just all gone out the window.
Power without oversight, no matter how distributed, will tend towards either complete chaos or tyranny (or both, if such a thing is possible). Giving three mutually distrustful criminals guns will not cause law and order to spring out of nothing.
An informed, angry and unforgiving citizenry is the only check on government, and we ain't go that.
Yes, sadly, several decades ago, one of the parties started running on the platform of "the government is broken" and to help the electability of said platform, they kept breaking the government.
Look, I vote blue too, but you can't ignore that the Democrats have also pushed the slider further and further toward executive power every chance they get. Well, I guess I can't tell you what to do, so I suppose you can.
I don't "vote blue." I vote for whichever candidate offers the most realistic solutions to the problem at hand. At times this may be "blue" but not necessarily. I have also voted 3rd party and skipped voting for a specific role alotgether.
Also, not even sure what you are talking about. My point specifically was about the congress, where the Republicans have stonewalled legislation, stolen SCOTUS seats, and shut down the government the vast majority of shutdowns since it became a "legitimate"(?) tactic.
> Democrats have also pushed the slider further and further toward executive power every chance they get
> CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing.
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
All agencies are ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected leaders as the Supreme Court recently upheld. No part of the government is independent body, it’s in one of the 3 branches.
Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
> Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
The president just tried to operate an executive order and it got shut down by the courts.
The specific ruling is about the president being immune from criminal charges while in office. And yeah, you can’t be taking George Washington to court (or jail) while he is leading the revolution. It’s essential for the nation to have a functioning leader, especially among the fog of war.
The Bible story of David and Saul presents another example of this principle.
To bring it back though… what you’re telling me is we can’t trust a democracy to elect an executive.
This makes no sense to me. National governments have no moral or legal responsibility to monitor the environment, because they also regulate pollution? Is this a joke?
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
Ah yes, we can't trust that our elected officials understand their duty well enough just fund Science and find out stuff works, so better throw up our hands and let the "market" do it.
Your view isn't controversial because it's daring, it's just plain nihilistic. It's just anti-government dogma which is cultivated by an incredibly cynical media atmosphere.
> To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.
I would like to see climate research funded, but it needs to be de-politicized and stop being used to push fear propaganda and sinister policies.
They used it to flat out destroy the economies in much of Europe, while somehow China and India were ignored despite being orders of magnitude bigger problems, according to their own narrative.
If any of the above were honest, there would have been blanket trade restrictions and sanctions on China and India so quickly it would make your head spin.
The research is supposed to establish the facts that politicians then interpret?
I think, especially in the US, there's no shared starting point anymore. Which makes it very hard for people with different opinions to have a conversation. Not funding science can only make that worse
Nope. The main cost of the old climate.gov was the salaries of the folks writing the articles and pulling together the resources. They were not getting paid exorbitantly and are quite interested in still getting paid. Source: I am one of those people.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.