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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.

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.

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

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.

[0] https://www.climate.us/faqs

Which part? I interpret it as:

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.

What's not accurate?

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

Who is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?

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?

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.

Private companies can pay for their own data collection and if they have a dispute with the government's analysis, they can go to court.

Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?

How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.

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.

> 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.

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.

That doesn't seem controversial to me.

I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.

Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.

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.

Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...

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?

> 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.

Simply hosting the website wasn't costing that much

That's easy to do. No one has expectations of this one.

As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.

I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research

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.