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Trump is erasing public climate change data

Credit: Fulton Ring/ Thred
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London, UK
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Trump has ordered the USDA to take down government websites referencing the climate crisis. Maverick scientists are fighting back and scrambling to preserve public data.

Trump still believes climate change is a hoax and is tyrannically plotting to ensure the American people take his word for it.

Given there was a 40% decrease in the term across the websites of federal environmental agencies in his last tenure, scientists are bracing for another purge of similar, or greater proportions.

Since the dreaded announcement came in February, a climate portal on the Department of Defenseโ€™s page has been scrapped along with the dedicated site for the Department of State. Iโ€™ve linked both, for your displeasure.

These are two just two casualties of the blanket directive, which also orders the elimination of any policy positions or funding related to climate change or โ€˜environmental justice.โ€™ Under the guise of economic growth and practicality, the Trump administration classifies any capital or information related to the state of our planet as a waste or distraction.

The tirade recently targeted the Federal Management Agencyโ€™s โ€˜Future Risk Indexโ€™, a popular online tool which projects economic loss based on extreme weather events like floods or wildfires in real time.

In an instant, years of precious data collected from the likes of NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration went kaputโ€ฆ or so the Presidentโ€™s minions thought.

With a hunch that Trumpโ€™s return to office would mean another ecological exodus for public records, two rogue software engineers backed-up versions of the toolkit just in case it wound up in the search light.

A matter of weeks later, their prudence would be vindicated. The Future Risk Index was scrubbed from existence for only a matter of hours before it popped up on GitHub free of charge.

Rajan Desai and Jeremy Herzog, who both work at consulting firm Fulton Ring, claim they were tipped off that the online resource was in danger. They immediately started grabbing screenshots and downloaded data so they could recreate the resource โ€“ which only went live in December 2024, by the way.

Despite the admirable efforts of the archivist duo, they concede that the tool probably canโ€™t be advanced any further without funding and the prior connections to federal agencies. Itโ€™s unclear if theyโ€™re going to pursue either. The index is essentially frozen; its data preserved, but with no scope to grow on a more granular level.

It had been created, first and foremost, to quantify the ambiguous effects of climate change allowing state officials, urban planners, and businesses to make plans accordingly for the future.

With it now removed from its original, accessible holding place, itโ€™s a grim inevitability that the resource will receive less hits and ultimately prove less useful.

โ€˜Even the best efforts that people are doing to archive this data, thereโ€™s so much information thatโ€™s lost,โ€™ Desai says. โ€˜Thereโ€™s more information thatโ€™s in peopleโ€™s heads that is just not documented, and weโ€™re never going to know what that information loss looks like.โ€™

In the big picture of Trumpโ€™s masterplan to unravel the USโ€™ ecological progress, this story is but a drop in the ocean. Alarming as the daily headlines are, nonetheless, itโ€™s encouraging to see that people arenโ€™t willing to lay down and concede.

We simply cannot afford to.

Editor in Chief London, UK

I’m Jamie (He/Him), the Editor in Chief at Thred. Keeping up with gaming and revolutionary technology is my forte, but when away from my keyboard, you’ll probably find me wrapped around a large Tango ice blast at the latest mediocre horror flick. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn and drop me some ideas/feedback viaย email.

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