U of G professor helping preserve climate change data from Trump-scrubbing

Isabel Buckmaster,
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

For the past several months, University of Guelph geography professor Eric Nost has been working with the Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI) to preserve climate change and other data sets being removed by the Trump administration.

Undergoing a similar series of data rescue events the first time Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Nost said experts at the time didn’t see a lot of data being deleted or scrubbed but rather a lot of changes to websites and the way climate change was described.

This time around, Nost said climate experts have seen a faster and more extensive effort by the Trump administration to “remove access to even just basic census demographic data, in addition to public health data and, of course, climate environment data.”

“A lot of what we’re archiving and safeguarding is very basic biophysical indicators of climate changes, environmental conditions that are really important means by which we understand how the climate is changing,” said Nost. “We’ve also made sure to prioritize data sets that tell us who is impacted by changing climate and environmental conditions, which we’ve seen be a real target of this administration.”

So far, Nost said the group has managed to archive approximately 60 data sets ranging from sea level rise estimates to wildfire risk predictions and pollution data sets. This doesn’t include efforts from other organizations to preserve other data related to things like health and human rights.

“Data sets that merge climate and social data have been a real target,” said Nost. “We’ve seen a lot of them come down, but thankfully, we were able to get to them and protect that data in many cases before it was removed from access.”

Calling climate change a “global problem,” Nost said Canadians should be concerned about the data removal because the US government has done a lot of basic work about what climate around the world looks like and information from agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are often used in other countries.

The removal of climate change data and other resources will also likely directly impact tools that use generative AI like ChatGPT because it changes what information is available to the AI and Nost is worried it will narrow how people understand climate and environmental issues.

But the bigger issue is how decreased investments in science and data initiatives may lead to “a more patchy set of records,” said Nost.

“It’s one thing to take down existing data sets, it’s another thing to no longer fund data collection,” said Nost. “If it’s not being funded this year, that’s going to be a year missing from the long-term data set where we won’t be able to say anything about what happened then.”

The data removal has been “really disappointing” to Nost who said he’d rather spend time actually analyzing data and making recommendations on how it could be improved.

“It shouldn’t fall on me or my colleagues to have to step in to maintain this data infrastructure,” said Nost. “I’m not an American taxpayer but this is publicly funded information and data and it’s the responsibility of the government collecting those taxes to maintain it and ensure its availability.”

When asked how residents can help, Nost said volunteers are needed to help download data sets and upload them to repositories but that the best way to get involved is to “remain aware.”

“Be skeptical about what you read when you visit any authoritative source of information and try to look at what might be missing from it or what’s been changed using some of the tools out there like the Wayback Machine,” said Nost. “Being that kind’ve informed person and using the tools available to do that I think is really important as well.”

Isabel Buckmaster is the Local Journalism Initiative reporter for GuelphToday.