Ultimately still comes down to trust. Still better to have a backup of data that MIGHT be poisoned vs not having it at all. If we have multiple copies from the original source we should be able to determine if somethings been messed with.

These people where convinced a pizza restaurant was the center of a global pedo ring based on nothing but deliberately misconstrued sentences they claim are code.

They'll believe whatever they want.

(I think I'm being a smartass, btw. I think.)

By the same token, not every "green" program is a great thing... and even in treaties, exempting the worst actors (China, India) because they are often considered third world doesn't do a lot to help the global issues. Improved working requirements as a requisite for international trade deals would go a long way towards "cleaning up."

I bring this up, as I tend to see a lot of people who question the approach, intensity, and cost getting lumped in with climate deniers.

Likewise, trying to push for electric cars doesn't make a lot of sense in that the environmental impact of an electric car takes 5+ years to outweigh that of a gas car, not counting how the electricity is generated. Also, not accounting for the overall impact of replacing said batteries, or other maintenance.

And yes, cost is another issue... depending on what is the replacing technology, there are other cost-benefit analysis that should be done on a case by case bases against the larger impact. I also feel that if we take the premise at reducing pollution, vs. "omg the world is going to die" kind of reactionism it's a bit easier to sell more broadly to conservatives.

Fighting/reducing pollution should be enough of a goal by itself, a large enough portion of the population lives in large enough cities to understand smog and feel it when breathing, some cities far worse than others. The broader (saving the world) mentality doesn't do much on its' own, is much harder to sell, and too big.

I'm tired of the whole "you're a denier" shibboleth--there very well may be very strong negative human impact on the climate. I'm sure there is. Whether it is global is another question and whether it is stoppable is yet another. But what I most disgusted by is how the issue is used as a political weapon to basically implement a far left, collectivist agenda worldwide. It's like the old-school soviets found a new angle on justifying their desire for total control over populations. It will not stand.

Git uses hashes for everything: files are placed in .git/objects/ by their hash, each commit lists the hashes of files in the working directory, and each commit points to the hash(es) of its parent(s)

Using Git it's possible to verify the integrity of the entire repository and its history, making it impossible to tamper with without leaving traces. It's also possible to have multiple copies (clones) of the data and to verify that they are exactly the same.

If you have a copy of such a collection you can compare it against a copy held by the originating institution. If that becomes impossible for some reason, then if you can track down any of the original files you could prove that that portion of the data is correct, which lends trust to the rest of the collection.

Of course, it's possible this would not convince a die-hard trump supporter. /s

There's more to climate science than the yes/no of whether climate change is a thing. We don't just need to know it's happening--we want to know details of how to model it, what different inputs have what affects, what the feedback loops are and how strong they are, how they and other effects interact...

> The U.S isn't the only country that collects this data. So even if changed, it doesn't matter.

Many countries collect data, but presumably the sets of data collected differ, and more data is better. Losing a large subset of our climate data would hurt advances in climate modeling.

It does if the data that was changed is the data that was used to support the consensus.

More generally, all data collected by research that is funded by taxpayers should be collected, cryptographically signed and verified, and archived where any taxpayer can see it. I have never understood why that is not already standard operating procedure.

I'm not saying it's right, and agree with you. But often there's a lot of entropy with the status quo, and to the seated incumbents in a space.

Losing that collection or archive would be a disaster for science and a loss for all of humanity. Destroying that data would be reminiscent of ISIS destroying relics in Palmyra except that destroying that data jeopardizes our future.

We know already that CO2 and other gases cause climate change and we understand the mechanism. I think that most of us would probably also agree that the earth is a sufficiently complex system that predicting accurately what effects we will see when is impossible. We expect to see more droughts, bigger storms and rising sea levels - but we can't really predict very accurately how big those things will be when. By the time we have accurate models it will be too late.

We know that we need to act now. Understanding climate change is not the most important research out there; what's important is developing technologies and industries to reduce our emissions. That research would be what I fear losing.

It's also worth considering the impact of some movements... as an example, there's significant impact in creating/shipping and replacing batteries on a large scale. It may not make as much sense compared to more efficient engines, and even additional looks at other engine techniques.

I find pollution relatively abhorrent on its' own though... recently driving through west Louisianan/east Texas and my initial thoughts as to the painful to breath air there was how can this be allowed to persist. I have mixed feelings all around, I just don't want to spend a lot of taxpayer money on ill-advised and lesser impacting processes. We do too much of that already.