Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it (werd.io)

I read it as

1. The temporary situation is not tenable

2. This stuff is within the proper role of government

3. Its diffuse public-benefits should be funded normally rather than require private donations

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.

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?

Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization, 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.

> how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?

Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.

It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure all they care about is $$$. The political winds don't matter which way they are blowing.

That's the Republican M.O.

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.

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.

Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Climate.gov was not the centralized and only storage spot for climate data. There's petabytes of it all over the place.

You want data? https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.

YCombinator has enough smarts to figure this out.

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.

What if pedophiles were sent to jail instead of elected.

Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.

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.