Disappearing Data
I woke up this morning to a really depressing thread on Twitter from the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick. He went looking for the data on climate change that used to be on the US Geological Survey’s website. In December 2016, its “Effects of #Climate Change” page had 2,825 items; today, it has none. Here’s his summary of the overall changes:
Resource Category | December 21, 2016 | September 17, 2017 |
---|---|---|
All Science Items | 5932 | 416 |
Web Pages | 5271 | |
Data | 320 | |
News | 227 | 3 |
Video | 104 | 82 |
Image/Photos | 9 | 292 |
Maps | 1 | |
Publications | 2 |
To paraphrase George Orwell, “He who controls the data controls the future.” There are dark times ahead…