#climate Data

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion.

The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service’s “Climate Risk Viewer,” which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands.

The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires.

The suit was brought by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York along with two environmental organizations, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group.

The plaintiffs had sought a court order requiring the department to restore the deleted pages. On Monday, the government said it would oblige.

Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote to Judge Margaret M. Garnett that he was representing the Agriculture Department in the lawsuit, and that the department had already begun restoring the pages and interactive tools described in the lawsuit. He said the department “expects to substantially complete the restoration process in approximately two weeks.”

Mr. Clayton asked the judge to adjourn a hearing scheduled for May 21. He said the department proposed to submit a report on its progress restoring the data after three weeks, and sought to address “appropriate next steps in this litigation.”

Jeffrey Stein, associate attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that represented the plaintiffs, along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said, “We’re glad that U.S.D.A. recognized that its blatantly unlawful purge of climate-change-related information is harming farmers and communities across the country.”

[teledyn]

@nasa has included a link to the source data, but the spirograph I'd really like to see would go back more — in this case they are discussing only the Industrial Era, so only consider from 1880, but we know from Byron and Shelly there was a deep chill in those years. If we could go back geologically, the resolution would be poor, but might it double-underline how FAST current changes are changing? (or if there are precarious resonances!)

[atompowers]

🥵 NASA Announces Summer 2023 Hottest on Record

📈 Here are your go-to downloadable charts & graphs to share

🌡️ Reminder: NASA is in the TOP 4 trusted sources of global warming information for ALL POLITICAL DEMOGRAPHICS

[crypto28ro]

Blockchain în Modelarea Riscurilor Climatice

Într-o eră în care schimbările climatice și degradarea mediului amenință stabilitatea socio-economică la nivel global, tehnologiile digitale emergente oferă noi instrumente pentru a colecta date, a monitoriza fenomene complexe și a construi soluții inovatoare de gestionare a riscurilor. Blockchain – cunoscut în principal pentru criptomonede precum Bitcoin și Ethereum – a ieșit la rampă ca o…

[reasonsforhope]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

[hope-for-the-planet]

World surpasses 40% clean power as renewables see record rise

This is from the Global Electricity Review 2025 by Ember. Although this isn't something you are going to see in newspaper headlines, the progress we made with renewables in 2024 is a pretty big deal and if you're someone who likes a lot of data and graphs it's really worth reading.

I'm going to leave this video here because Hank Green does a better job of covering it than I am going to.

"This to me feels like news. It feels like a big deal. It feels like things are changing, like we are hitting a moment with electricity generation that really does matter. And over the next five years we will hit the point where we are generating less and less energy with fossil fuels every year. That's great. And that's not news. I didn't see anyone covering this [...]. It's not news because it's not bad and it's also not news because it's not like 'we did it, we hit the moment!'."

I think this quote from Hank's video does a good job of encapsulating how the slow, gradual progress that is happening often doesn't make it into the news--because it's not a dramatic emergency or a "we did it, we fully solved climate change!" kind of moment that makes for good headlines.

But that then gives people the idea that we're hardly making any progress on addressing climate change, which is not true at all. The fact that we need to continue to double-down on this progress to do it more and faster does not negate that so much progress has already been made.

[catboybiologist]

By now, there's lots of people have heard about the internal CDC memos for all newly prepared manuscripts (like future scientific papers waiting to be published):

There's so much to comment on, and I'm seeing it all right now. What the state of science is. What this means for the queer community. All of that.

But fuck, I think I might genuinely start crying over this. As a transgender biologist, this feels like a brutally personal blow. I slowly accepted my gender alongside my biology education. The more misinformation that was spewed about "biological sex" by mainstream media, the more my professors, colleagues, and primary sources would casually drop information that proved they have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not an expert on sex determination, gender, or transgender biology specifically by any means. But my worldview has been crafted by my studies in genetics and molecular biology.

Engaging with this research helped me demystify transition. It helped me optimize my transition. It helped me explain how HRT and other steps of trans healthcare work to other people. And it helped me overcome my own internalized transphobia, and finally start transitioning, despite knowing I wanted to since my preteen years.

Who knows how enforceable internal guidelines like this will be. But its certainly going to scare a lot of researchers away from transgender healthcare and science in the coming years, and that breaks my heart.

There's a lot I can say here, but fuck. I just needed to vent for a moment. Fuck.

[rodspurethoughts]

NASA, Partners Launch US Greenhouse Gas Center to Share Climate Data

Visualization of total carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere in 2021NASA NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan, and other United States government leaders unveiled the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center Monday during the 28th annual United Nations Climate Conference (COP28). “NASA data is essential to making the changes needed on the…

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

#WDEFWeather #WeatherAlmanac for #ChattanoogaTN for Thursday, September 28, 2023. Without more rain, this month will go down in the books as one of the driest Septembers in Chattanooga history. Normal highs now in the very low 80's.

[politijohn]

Source

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing.

That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding that had been promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

The Agriculture Department referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, based in Binghamton; the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York; and the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The latter two groups relied on the department website for their research and advocacy, the lawsuit said.

Peter Lehner, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said the pages being purged were crucial for farmers facing risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The websites had contained information about how to mitigate dangers and adopt new agricultural techniques and strategies. Long-term weather data and trends are valuable in the agriculture industry for planning, research and business strategy.

“You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said.

The sites under the department’s umbrella include those of the Forest Service, which is responsible for stewardship of forests and grasslands; the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which helps landowners implement conservation practices; and those of other divisions focused on farms and ranches, disaster recovery and rural development.

The directive to delete the pages came by email from Peter Rhee, the department’s director of digital communications, according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs allege the actions violated three federal laws and were “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” They asked the court to compel the agency to restore the pages and to block it from deleting any others.

Wes Gillingham, president of the board of Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, said that farmers were just heading into planning for the summer growing season. He said taking information down because of a “political agenda about climate change” was senseless.

[gwydionmisha]

Trump's War on The Environment Continues

[probablyasocialecologist]

The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day. To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage.

[...]

The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions. Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centers are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like Tom’s air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.

[ganondoodle]

the company i work for decided that its switching from the german formal "You"(Sie) to the informal "you" (Du) in all of our websites so now we have to scour the entire database to change it and i quite frankly hate that, not just bc the unecessary extra work but especially bc its such a weird and unecessary change

i bet its bc everything here is getting englishfied (both literally and culturally it feels like, when my new boss talks its half in english bc every second german word is just replaced by an english one despite there being perfectly fine words for it in german too, its so annoying) and bc they want to sound more personal in hopes of getting more clients bc 'company is your fwiend uwu!!', i know this here is the amercian tm site so you wouldnt understand really but i do not want to be greeted with 'du' by companies, no, thats too personal, you dont know me and im not giving you my data, stay away!!

i guess thats how i would describe it .. the formal you is like a polite distance, like someone you dont know staying outside your personal space, but when its the informal 'you' it feels invasive unless i told you you can call me that, and that goes double for companies

maybe its a small thing that doesnt seem important but i cant stand it, im just a little part time worker doing data work so i got no say in it but the companies founder also announced hes giving his post to his kids some time ago so ...... since then theres been alot of changes and new projects that solely aim to imitate whats popular and whats done by other companies, despite ours being one that is, or used to be, intentionally different, like, that was the POINT, but i guess chasing trends is just too appealing for CEOs

[wachinyeya]

Geneva-based Infomaniak has been recovering 100 per cent of the electricity it uses since November 2024.

The recycled power will be able to fuel the centralised heating network in the Canton of Geneva and benefit around 6,000 households.

The centre is currently operating at 25 per cent of its potential capacity. It aims to reach full capacity by 2028.

Swiss data centre leads the way for a greener cloud industry

The data centre hopes to point to a greener way of operating in the electricity-heavy cloud industry.

"In the real world, data centres convert electricity into heat. With the exponential growth of the cloud, this energy is currently being released into the atmosphere and wasted,” Boris Siegenthaler, Infomaniak's Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, told news site FinanzNachrichten.

“There is an urgent need to upgrade this way of doing things, to connect these infrastructures to heating networks and adapt building standards."

Infomaniak has received several awards for the energy efficiency of its complexes, which operate without air conditioning - a rarity for hot data centres.

The company also builds infrastructure underground so that it doesn’t have an impact on the environment.

Swiss data centre recycles heat for homes

At Infomaniak, all the electricity that powers equipment like servers, inverters and ventilation is converted into heat at a temperature of 40 to 45C.

This is then channelled to an air/water exchanger which filters it into a hot water circuit. Heat pumps are used to increase its temperature to 67C in summer and 85C in winter.

How many homes will be heated by the data centre?

When the centre is operating at full capacity, it will supply Geneva’s heating network with 1.7 megawatts, the amount needed for 6,000 households per year or for 20,000 people to take a 5-minute shower every day.

This means the Canton of Geneva can save 3,600 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2eq) of natural gas every year, or 5,500 tCO2eq of pellets annually.

The system in place at Infomaniak’s data centre is free to be reproduced by other companies. There is a technical guide available explaining how to replicate the model and a summary for policymakers that advises how to improve design regulations and the sustainability of data centres.