Climate Data Protection Under Trump: Strategies and Tactics

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

On this panel, we address the multiple strategies and tactics employed by scientific activists to ensure the future for climate science. The inauguration of Trump coincided with what many climate scientists feared, the administration removed any mention of climate change from the White House website. Quickly after the election, though, scientifically minded activists, including academics in the fields of information and social sciences alongside scientists and technologists, had already initiated a process to duplicate and archive climate data from government repositories.

Each paper addresses a different set of problems and possibilities facing this emerging network of scientific activists. Questions range from how to describe these new archival practices, how to ensure the integrity of the data, and how to teach these tactics across different disciplinary backgrounds. Exploring the histories of The Toxic Release Inventory Database and Public Lab, we look at these other public science projects for guidance through the process of creating a structured and durable archive for use by activists, scientists, policy-makers, and any other interested onlookers. In doing so, we shed light on the promises and dangers of doing climate science at a time when industry and the state are hostile to its survival. Moreover, by documenting these strategies and tactics as they occur, we hope to be more than an explanatory footnote in the history of science, but rather give rise to an entirely new form of scientific practice, where objectivity and justice are united in practice.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Joan Donovan, University of California San Diego

Discussant

• Joan Donovan, University of California San Diego

Individual Presentations

• Grand Intentions, Small Interventions : Climate Data Rescue’s “Guerilla Archiving” as StatActivism - britt paris, UCLA Department of Information Studies

• Data Driven Communities: Using a Data Rescue Event to Build and Bridge Scientific Networks - Jennifer Pierre

• Decentralizing Climate Change Data while Preserving Scientific Value - Irene Pasquetto, UCLA

• Mind the (data) gap: The Community Science Model - Liz Barry, Public Lab