That’s great news. But rather ironic that the argument is that the data is useful/necessary for business. Not that’s it’s useful/necessary for human rights or other unimportant things.
Business/Insurance is a great reason to have federal climate reporting. There is no good reason to have it duplicated at every state, insurance, farm level. It is a massive savings/benefit to have it centralized.
That’s honestly the only argument that matters right now, unfortunately.
If they are able to put it back, does that mean heroic climate scientists, told to delete the data or be fired, hid it away someplace safe from the DOGE goons, or were the DOGE goons assigned to the deletion job and just half-assed it because they can’t do anything properly?
There were still copies in the National Archives. Just not readily available to the public, and more importantly, not getting updates.
There was probably some data backup. But they department probably did the thing they usually do when told to remove something: Restrict or remove public acces, it’s pretty common on government websites. There’s also a high likelyhood that the goons didn’t check for all the backups if they went in themselves.
As an example, just the other day I was looking for some data with all scripts and such turned off in the browser, when I landed on a twenty year old page that was replaced around fifteen years ago but they only added a redirect and replaced the link on the public pages. Found it through some archived links, and the rest of the page was still all there just without images, and with several working links.
My money is on the government not doing shit.
oops, can’t find it
