Guelph prof works to save U.S. climate data before it's scrubbed from websites

A University of Guelph professor is one of many experts working to preserve climate change data that the U.S. government is trying to scrub off the internet.

This comes after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration started taking down U.S. federal websites and pages containing climate change information.   

Eric Nost, an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph, is among those working with Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) to archive climate change data sets from U.S. federal government websites. 

"We also see a lot of tools for understanding what climate change is all about being removed, and in particular we see a lot of taking down of resources that describe who is most vulnerable to climate change," he said.

Nost said removing climate change information from the internet will affect the world's understanding of climate change and its effects. 

"When the U.S. government takes down this information, that just makes it all that much harder for people around the world, not just in the U.S., to understand what's happening, what's expected to happen, who's being affected," he said.

Nost's team is doing a number of things to prevent climate change data from being lost. 

"We started with an exercise in which we identified the data sets and tools and websites that we thought would be most vulnerable to changes. We then went and archived them. We would download them, and then upload them to repositories where they can be kept safe," he said. 

Information is always removed, archived

Nost has been working to preserve climate change information since the first Trump administration. His work is part of a project called the End of Term Project, which continuously archives millions of U.S. federal government websites. 

"This is something we've seen before, and it's something that was on our radar after Trump won this most recent election," he said.

Nost said climate change data sets were not necessarily taken down during Trump's first term, although they "did see a lot of scrubbing of mentions of climate change and climate change science on U.S. Federal government websites."

He said this time around, they noticed two types of information that are either changed or taken down.

"We see changes to websites, where we see entire websites about climate change, science and the effects of climate change being taken down," he said. 

A barrier to collaboration

While Nost works to preserve climate change data with other experts, overall Canada-U.S. collaborative work on weather and climate is facing another challenge. 

Earlier this month, CBC News saw internal emails from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that direct staff to receive senior approvals for "all upcoming international engagements." 

Nost said his work has not been affected by this, but he has seen his colleagues' work being affected by the directives. 

"It's certainly a really harmful situation, limiting those kinds of collaborations," Nost said. 

Aaron Fisk, Canada Research Chair in Changing Great Lakes Ecosystems at the University of Windsor, told CBC News Windsor earlier this month that communication between them and their U.S. counterparts have become challenging due to the directive.

"We tried to have a quick meeting with one of our collaborators … and they were denied access," Fisk said.

Fisk also noted that since the changes, email exchanges between him and his U.S. counterparts have slowed to a minimum, forcing him and some of his colleagues to put their research on hold. 

David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), based out of Western University in London, told CBC News London that there is concern the directive will affect future climate change studies, especially since "data and research conducted by NOAA are intertwined with work done by Canadian climatologists and meteorologists, including at Environment and Climate Change Canada."

"I mean, we don't have any Canadian weather satellites that we can use every day for weather and for research," Sills said.

Not everything can be saved

Nost pointed out that with the amount of information out there, they cannot save everything.

"There's always going to be things that we miss," he said. "The US federal government is actually the world's largest publisher. So we'll never get everything, and that's OK … we're always going to have to be vigilant."

But Nost sees value in ensuring access to climate change information is preserved. Calling it "a matter for accountability in a democratic society," Nost said having access to this information helps keep leaders accountable for their actions.

"An example of that, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently trying to make claims about reducing waste, and finding misspent funds from the previous administration. Well, they [aren't] sharing the evidence to support their claims about fraud because they removed that from public access. They basically deleted that data set," he said.

"So if we're going to try to hold leaders accountable, we need the data, the evidence to do that."

Nost said people can access the archived information via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, or his team's website at screening-tools.com.