Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
January 2013: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/call-time-congressional-fundr...
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
April 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congr...
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
If companies don’t even benefit then why should the government produce it? Who is the audience?
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
Heck, it's not only canonical, it's goshdang prehistoric. Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and response) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything with a better pedigree besides adjudicating disputes or waging war.
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.
s/country/world/
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?
How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.
It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
And do consider that the supreme court has ruled that they're immune for anything that's an 'official act'.
Accountability of the executive left the room in 2024
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.
Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.
I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
You want data? https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.