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Former NOAA employees built Climate.us to preserve climate data and resources
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoBlog post from a few weeks ago: https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches-independent-website-trusted-climate-information https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689182)
- cheschire 2mo ago> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for. Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
- simonw 2mo agoWhat's not accurate?
- mchusma 2mo agoI 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.
- estearum 2mo agoCollecting 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.
- Terr_ 2mo ago> 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.
- bestouff 2mo agoDoing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoPrivate companies don’t care about having accurate data? Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
- bestouff 2mo agoPrivate companies care way more about making money.
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoMaking money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
- munk-a 2mo agoThis is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- autoexec 2mo ago> Making money requires accurate information about the world. A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.
- hvb2 2mo agoSo, 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
- sethherr 2mo agoBut why? 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.
- jandrewrogers 2mo agoMaking 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.
- bumby 2mo agoAs 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.
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoOperating 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?
- bumby 2mo agoI don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoSo then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
- simonw 2mo agoIs this really an expensive problem to solve? Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
- groundzeros2015 2mo agoThat sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoI'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.
- cheschire 2mo agoThey’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
- estearum 2mo ago> 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!
- bborud 2mo agoYou are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea». Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
- atahanacar 2mo agoFrom my understanding of USA as a foreigner, tax dollars are for corporate bailouts and military.
- petcat 2mo agoAs 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.
- tehjoker 2mo agoThis is kind of a strange take. 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.
- petcat 2mo agoThis is kind of a strange take. > Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff My state has completely state-funded healthcare, and a renowned state-funded university system. USA is a nation of states and those states (mostly) make their own way. I live in one of the good ones.
- tehjoker 2mo agoIt makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
- Terr_ 2mo agoWhich 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.
- nickff 2mo agoThis 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.
- mempko 2mo agoThe point of a democracy is the people regulate it. It seems we are so far from a democracy and people feel so little agency, that we forget this. Yes, this should be done by the government. Yes the people MUST make sure the government is doing what they want. The problem with putting work like this in private hands is they are not as accountable to the people as a government SHOULD be.
- turtlebits 2mo agoWho is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?
- dnautics 2mo agodo 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)
- whatever1 2mo agoWith the AI rush, it all makes sense why suddenly all Silicon Valley became pro Trump and anti climate overnight.
- xnx 2mo agoThey may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
- hvb2 2mo agoThat'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
- redsocksfan45 2mo ago[dead]
- willmadden 2mo agoI 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.
- hvb2 2mo agoThe 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
- evan_ 2mo agoSimply hosting the website wasn't costing that much
- iAMkenough 2mo agoThat'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.
- Varelion 2mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2mo agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AmazingEveryDay 2mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 2mo agoHN is for curious conversation between humans and we have clear guidelines. That’s been unchanged for two decades. Bots, trolls and any other actors using HN in ways that breach the guidelines are banned, often automatically by our software, or failing that, by moderators, and in such cases we don’t “ask” first. If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.
- Varelion 2mo agoYCombinator did invest in flock...
- tomhow 2mo agoWe’ve never prevented anyone from scrutinizing/criticizing Flock or any other YC company on HN. That’s actually the first rule of HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20pg%20chair&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- imoverclocked 2mo agoI'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.
- strictnein 2mo agoClimate.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 https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.
- imoverclocked 2mo agoThat only makes my question even more applicable... just with a wider scope. As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
- cwmoore 2mo agoSounds grand, but it is not in scope. Instead, each citizen has a volition and a voice and a vote—with exceptions, and at personal expense. And as a humanitarian with reservations, I say tax the bots for UBI.
- mmooss 2mo ago> each citizen has a volition and a voice and a vote Each citizen can't evaluate climate data. Specialization is necessary.
- budsniffer952 2mo agoEach citizen doesn't need to, only some citizens need be able to. Because the data is available. Not sure about you, but I'm glad we moved away from a system where an anointed cadre of people tell us what's what.
- Self-Perfection 2mo agoWhat 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.
- godelski 2mo agoHonestly, 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
- shrinks99 2mo agoThe Library of Congress runs Webrecorder's Python Wayback for their web archive replay and has an extensive collection of over 35,000 web archives each comprising multiple pages: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/01/beta-release-of-library-of-congress-web-archives-playback-services/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/01/beta-release-of-libr...
- godelski 2mo agoThat's awesome. Thanks for letting me know. It's a great start
- tokai 2mo agoIts 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.
- Magicrafter13 2mo agoPartisan 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?
- abetusk 2mo agoAnything 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 https://www.climate.us/faqs
- thaumasiotes 2mo ago> 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?
- abetusk 2mo agoYeah, that is odd. Maybe a mistake? 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. [0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_the_difference_between_CC0_and_the_Public_Domain_Mark_.28.22PDM.22.29.3F https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_the_di... [1] https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/en/beratung/lizenzen/cc-lizenzen-fragen/cc-lizenzen-was-ist-cc0.html https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/en/beratung/li...
- aussieguy1234 2mo agoA similar thing happened back in Australia years back. We had the Climate Commission, which did alot of great work. It was a government department and fully funded by the government. Then a conservative, climate denying government came to power and shut it down. Literally within 48 hours, they obtained alternative funding from private sources, then rebirthed the organization as the independent Climate Council. Many of the fired workers were re hired and the new organization does similar work to the previous one. It's still in operation today. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/ https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/
- pvaldes 2mo agoThis 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.
- xnx 2mo agoLooks like they're not setting unique page titles. (example: https://www.climate.us/maps-data/global-climate-dashboard/indicator?indicator_id=10162&page=0 https://www.climate.us/maps-data/global-climate-dashboard/in...) Page titles should be unique and descriptive, not just "| Climate.us".