While Wiggin and Allen say the changes to are disconcerting, they also note they are small potatoes compared with what could come next: the large government data sets related to climate change and environmental health that scientists use for research. We hope to produce a weekly report on changes,” Wiggin says, perhaps in the form of a newsletter. “We’ll be letting people know what the changes exactly are. Over the first 100 days of the new administration, a volunteer team of programmers will be scanning government websites and comparing them to the archived, pre-Trump versions, to check for changes. But this is what we internally had predicted and prepared for,” added Bethany Wiggin, the director of the environmental humanities program at Penn and another organizer of the data-rescuing event. “I wish we had been wrong about our concerns. “In the last four days I think we’ve been working 22 hours a day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to happen.” Allen is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing event there. “We’re having a heart attack,” said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. It’s typical of incoming administrations to take down some of their predecessor’s pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a clear indication of the Trump administration’s position on climate science. But suddenly, at exactly noon on Friday as Trump was sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began to come true: The climate change-related pages on disappeared.
Hackers, librarians, scientists, and archivists had been working around the clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal climate and environment data off government websites as possible before Trump took office. Another is planned for early February at New York University. A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country: Volunteer “data rescue” events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov,, DOE.gov, and, uploading them to the Internet Archive. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern California. Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as IT consultants or data managers at startups others were undergrad computer science majors.