Synthstuff - music, photography and more...

Scrubbing our Scientific History

Yesterday, I had written about the massive Canadian science library deletion. Today I wake to see that the go-to historical record for web sites has been doing a bit of purging of its own. The Internet Wayback Machine running at Archive.org has this to say about itself:

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public.

In the last couple of days, they have purged links to NASA's Climate Data at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Links that once worked now present blank pages. From Steven Goddard (no relation) at Real Science:

History Is A Thing Of The Past In The US
On January 1, I made a post showing the 1997 version of GISS global temperatures:

The archived link now leads to a blank page, as does all other GISS captures from 1997. All of these links worked four days ago, all now lead to blank pages.

http://web.archive.org/web/19970301012952/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP/GLB.Ts.txt
http://web.archive.org/web/19970301005139/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP/
http://web.archive.org/web/19970714134644/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP/GLB.Ts.txt
http://web.archive.org/web/19970714131920/http://www.giss.nasa.gov/Data/GISTEMP/

Many other archived GISS temperatures from other years also lead to blank pages now.

One of Steven's readers had this to say:

And these same people want to convince you and I to put big gov in charge of our medical history.

I do hope that someone, somewhere is carefully backing this data up and will let us have a copy when we get some adults back in the room again. What is really sad is that the Internet Archive has a set of published standards for Managing requests for information removal. NASA is firmly in the DOT.GOV category and here is their entry:

Type of removal request
Requests by governments.

Response
Archivists will exercise best-efforts compliance with applicable court orders.
Beyond that, as noted in the Library Bill of Rights,
'Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.'

All of this data belongs to us as the research that produced it was funded with our tax dollars. They have no right to hide it from us even though it (the raw data) doesn't align with their opinion regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming. Posted by DaveH at January 5, 2014 8:13 AM