For an overview of the project, see this:
Also see:
Trump's choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruit, called himself a "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda". Pruitt even sued this agency to block Obama's plan to fight global warming. Trump's choice for the Department of Energy, Rick Perry, claimed that "we have been experiencing a cooling trend", and said "there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects".
This made it imperative to back up the many climate databases held by US government agencies before the Trump administration takes them offline. We hope he won't be rash enough to delete these precious records. But: better safe than sorry!
In fact, these backups are worth having regardless of the current political situation. They should have been made long ago. But Trump's choices for cabinet triggered a rush to get the job done before he takes office:
The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project was part of this effort. We backed up 30 terabytes of data from NASA, NOAA, and other agencies.
Our team was led by four volunteers. Jan Galkowski is a statistician with a strong interest in climate science. He works at Akamai Technologies, a company responsible for serving at least 15% of all web traffic. He began downloading climate data on the 11th of December. Shortly thereafter John Baez, a mathematician and well-known science blogger at U. C. Riverside, joined in to coordinate publicity for the project. He'd already founded an organization called the Azimuth Project, which helps scientists and engineers cooperate on environmental issues. So, we called this new effort the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project.
When Jan started running out of storage space, Scott Maxwell jumped in. He used to work for NASA — driving a Mars rover among other things — and now he works for Google. He set up a 10-terabyte account on Google Drive and started backing up data himself. A couple of days later Sakari Maaranen joined the team. He's a systems architect at Ubisecure, a Finnish firm, with access to a high-bandwidth connection. He set up servers with Hetzner that provide us with 10 terabytes of storage each, gigabit bandwidth and 30 terabytes of a monthly traffic.
We want to keep US government environmental databases safely backed up until larger institutions step in and help out. We computed hash codes for these datasets to help us prove our backups are authentic.
For more on our project, see:
For more on the big picture, see:
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu
© 2017 John Baez