Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
….“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
I doubt this will happen. I’m not even sure how it could happen. But it’s chilling that a bunch of working scientists think there’s even a 5 percent chance that it might happen.
This is the real danger of a Trump presidency. I figure there’s a 95 percent chance that it ends up being a garden variety Republican administration—which is bad enough, of course. But there’s a 5 percent chance of something truly catastrophic happening. I don’t know what, and I don’t know when, but it’s a real possibility.
