Eight years ago, as the Trump administration was getting ready to take office for the first time, mathematician John Baez was making his own preparations.
Together with a small group of friends and colleagues, he was arranging to download large quantities of public climate data from federal websites in order to safely store them away. Then-President-elect Donald Trump had repeatedly denied the basic science of climate change and had begun nominating climate skeptics for cabinet posts. Baez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, was worried the information — everything from satellite data on global temperatures to ocean measurements of sea-level rise — might soon be destroyed.
His effort, known as the Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, archived at least 30 terabytes of federal climate data by the end of 2017.
In the end, it was an overprecaution.
