> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for.
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
simonw•Jul 13, 2026
What's not accurate?
mchusma•Jul 13, 2026
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
Terr_•Jul 13, 2026
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
bestouff•Jul 13, 2026
Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
Private companies don’t care about having accurate data?
Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
bestouff•Jul 13, 2026
Private companies care way more about making money.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
munk-a•Jul 13, 2026
This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
bumby•Jul 13, 2026
Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.
throwaway_7274•Jul 13, 2026
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
And governments don’t face bad incentives that would cause them to hide information?
munk-a•Jul 13, 2026
Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
I would characterize it as the things the government would lie about are different than the things a company would lie about.
throwaway_7274•Jul 13, 2026
They do. Often for different kinds of things. It’s not “government good, private bad” or the other way around. Both are facile views.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
Agreed. Different organizations with different incentives. Neither of them have the privileged or an unbiased view.
counters•Jul 13, 2026
Biased about what?
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
hvb2•Jul 13, 2026
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
sethherr•Jul 13, 2026
But why?
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
bumby•Jul 13, 2026
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
bumby•Jul 13, 2026
I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
So then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
simonw•Jul 13, 2026
Is this really an expensive problem to solve?
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
That sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
crote•Jul 13, 2026
The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
I agree that anti-competitive coercion of access is bad.
counters•Jul 13, 2026
> The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
ImPostingOnHN•Jul 13, 2026
Sure, why not. No problem.
That's a good example of how government open data can support both people and business.
crote•Jul 13, 2026
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
I think the point is that there has been a push to move away from this data continuing to be available from these sources.
counters•Jul 13, 2026
There has not.
counters•Jul 13, 2026
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
toomuchtodo•Jul 13, 2026
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
cheschire•Jul 13, 2026
They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service.
But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
bborud•Jul 13, 2026
You are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea».
Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
I can't understand what you're trying to say.
bborud•Jul 13, 2026
I know.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Oh no, it's not because I don't understand the civic structure of my society. It's because your comment is poorly written. Want to give it another shot?
ChrisMarshallNY•Jul 13, 2026
Should ask ChatGPT to refactor it (but then it would get flagged as slop).
bee_rider•Jul 13, 2026
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
sbseitz•Jul 13, 2026
Would be amazing if the reps actually did what we wanted instead of what they are paid by outside entities to do. We should try that!
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS•Jul 13, 2026
Hard disagree, my rep is an idiot
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Data be damned then! Good point.
Loughla•Jul 13, 2026
I bet you'll find that more people don't approve of what their representative is doing than do approve.
Low voter turnout allows for bullshit to slip through the cracks by targeting very small blocs of voters.
I genuinely believe that most problems in government would be fixed if voluntary voter turnout was around 99%, and that low rates, especially during midterms, is the largest threat to democracy in the United States as we know it to date.
criddell•Jul 13, 2026
What do you mean by outside entities? Foreign governments?
simonw•Jul 13, 2026
Their donors. In the USA members of congress spend an embarrassingly large amount of their time on the phone to their donors ensuring they are happy enough to fund their next run.
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
UncleMeat•Jul 13, 2026
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
wat10000•Jul 13, 2026
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
mempko•Jul 13, 2026
Quick question, what is your mental model of the climate?
justin66•Jul 13, 2026
Wow, you're really focused on what's important.
bborud•Jul 13, 2026
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
atahanacar•Jul 13, 2026
From my understanding of USA as a foreigner, tax dollars are for corporate bailouts and military.
petcat•Jul 13, 2026
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
tehjoker•Jul 13, 2026
This is kind of a strange take.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
WalterBright•Jul 13, 2026
66% of Federal spending is on entitlements.
strictnein•Jul 13, 2026
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
Loughla•Jul 13, 2026
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
Terr_•Jul 13, 2026
Which part? I interpret it as:
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
nickff•Jul 13, 2026
This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
turtlebits•Jul 13, 2026
Who is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?
dnautics•Jul 13, 2026
do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)
ryandrake•Jul 13, 2026
Can we do the same thing for military funding? Default its budget to zero, and if anyone cares, let them donate a few bucks?
dnautics•Jul 13, 2026
you're welcome to move to costa rica
turtlebits•Jul 13, 2026
I care that the data is out there and helps with weather forecasting. My taxes pay for that.
Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.
cogman10•Jul 13, 2026
Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
dnautics•Jul 13, 2026
is there like a list of things that government is responsible for, or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
cogman10•Jul 13, 2026
> is there like a list of things that government is responsible for
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
update: it turns out the parent org hasn't set up donations for this sub org, so i donated to climate action instead (also under the parent org)
jjordan•Jul 13, 2026
To stay out of jail, mostly.
alphawhisky•Jul 13, 2026
This was my thought on the issue as well. How does moving it to private companies benefit anyone except the companies (who can now legally price gouge)? This is a centralized service, and just like healthcare, the numbers show that integrity goes out the window once financialized.
mannanj•Jul 13, 2026
That doesn't seem controversial to me.
I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.
Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
> CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
mannanj•Jul 13, 2026
Ah ok. Well I don't see it limiting their misconduct and behavior, do you?
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Yes, I do.
Perhaps you mean to say: I don't see it eliminating their misconduct and behavior.
sampli•Jul 13, 2026
The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?
imoverclocked•Jul 13, 2026
> stations in remote places all over the country
s/country/world/
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS•Jul 13, 2026
You're not wrong, but I would like to point out that there is also the Civilian Weather Observer Program (CWOP) that is fed by a lot of private weather stations (the kind you can buy at Walmart of Amazon and put at your house). I believe the data is aggregated and averaged to account for variations in installation deficiencies, and used to inform/enhance the government maintained data feeds.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
Private companies can pay for their own data collection and if they have a dispute with the government's analysis, they can go to court.
Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?
How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
gman83•Jul 13, 2026
That would be great if the courts were actually neutral arbitrators and not captured political entities.
estearum•Jul 13, 2026
"The courts" writ large are doing just fine. SCOTUS in particular is a cesspool, but that is not the typical situation at all.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
9dev•Jul 13, 2026
This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.
sampli•Jul 13, 2026
These checks and balances failed long before Trump started abusing the system
sbseitz•Jul 13, 2026
Not to this extent!
buellerbueller•Jul 13, 2026
Yes, sadly, several decades ago, one of the parties started running on the platform of "the government is broken" and to help the electability of said platform, they kept breaking the government.
fwip•Jul 13, 2026
Look, I vote blue too, but you can't ignore that the Democrats have also pushed the slider further and further toward executive power every chance they get. Well, I guess I can't tell you what to do, so I suppose you can.
alphawhisky•Jul 13, 2026
You misspelled "self-corruption"
tastyfreeze•Jul 13, 2026
Congress abdicated the majority of their authority to the executive over time by creating executive agencies. Now everybody is upset because the executive is actually using the power that Congress gave to it. The primary check on government growth is the three branches contending for power. No branch wants another branch to become more powerful and make their branch irrelevant. So, to fix the current issue, Congress can remove the power it has given to the executive and restore balance.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
All agencies are ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected leaders as the Supreme Court recently upheld. No part of the government is independent body, it’s in one of the 3 branches.
hvb2•Jul 13, 2026
Ignoring the guy who's there now. How accountable is the president really, especially in their second term.
And do consider that the supreme court has ruled that they're immune for anything that's an 'official act'.
Accountability of the executive left the room in 2024
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
hvb2•Jul 13, 2026
> Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
groundzeros2015•Jul 13, 2026
The president just tried to operate an executive order and it got shut down by the courts.
The specific ruling is about the president being immune from criminal charges while in office. And yeah, you can’t be taking George Washington to court (or jail) while he is leading the revolution. It’s essential for the nation to have a functioning leader, especially among the fog of war.
The Bible story of David and Saul presents another example of this principle.
To bring it back though… what you’re telling me is we can’t trust a democracy to elect an executive.
wat10000•Jul 13, 2026
Except the Federal Reserve for some reason.
unethical_ban•Jul 13, 2026
This makes no sense to me. National governments have no moral or legal responsibility to monitor the environment, because they also regulate pollution? Is this a joke?
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
actionfromafar•Jul 13, 2026
Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing.
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
pstuart•Jul 13, 2026
> Judges being elected that nobody knows.
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
cogman10•Jul 13, 2026
> how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.
It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
imoverclocked•Jul 13, 2026
> To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
yalogin•Jul 13, 2026
I respect cynicism and questioning stuff but this is misplaced. You have to trust the government since they are potentially the least partisan source here. Yes the data can be misconstrued by legislators but the truth of the data cannot be in question. It’s healthy to question it but the solution is to require proof of non-sabotage. It takes a lot of money and resources to pull this data together. It’s compiled by organizations across the world and being the trustworthy anchor is the most efficient way to achieve this. With that the government agency has every incentive to be non partisan and operate with integrity.
anigbrowl•Jul 13, 2026
I agree with your feelings but 'activists and independent scientists' do not have the resources to maintain that sort of infrastructure over the long term and will also be continually fending off attacks on their credibility. Institutions exist because volunteering has limitations.
whatever1•Jul 13, 2026
With the AI rush, it all makes sense why suddenly all Silicon Valley became pro Trump and anti climate overnight.
drop_star•Jul 13, 2026
I'm pretty sure all they care about is $$$. The political winds don't matter which way they are blowing.
xnx•Jul 13, 2026
They may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
hvb2•Jul 13, 2026
That's easy to do. No one has expectations of this one.
As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.
I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
evan_•Jul 13, 2026
Simply hosting the website wasn't costing that much
iAMkenough•Jul 13, 2026
That's the Republican M.O.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.
Varelion•Jul 13, 2026
Curious to see if there was any money in the Oligarch slushfund to pay bots and troll farms to refute climate science today, or if it was already all spend on pro-flock astroturfing.
imoverclocked•Jul 13, 2026
I'm glad someone managed to save the data that we all payed for.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
strictnein•Jul 13, 2026
Climate.gov was not the centralized and only storage spot for climate data. There's petabytes of it all over the place.
That only makes my question even more applicable... just with a wider scope.
As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
mycall•Jul 13, 2026
YCombinator has enough smarts to figure this out.
naturalmovement•Jul 13, 2026
How can we use a bucket of mostly useless data to enrich ourselves by building more VC-funded apps? I'm asking the important questions.
Johnny_Bonk•Jul 13, 2026
Why would you say it’s useless data?
ggm•Jul 13, 2026
You're replying to an account which self-identifies as a troll. (my interpretation of what they write about themselves on their about page)
Johnny_Bonk•Jul 13, 2026
Thanks for the clarification lol
Self-Perfection•Jul 13, 2026
What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
godelski•Jul 13, 2026
Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
What if pedophiles were sent to jail instead of elected.
Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.
titzer•Jul 13, 2026
The media in the US is utterly feckless and broken.
Magicrafter13•Jul 13, 2026
Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
9 Comments
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
That's a good example of how government open data can support both people and business.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
Low voter turnout allows for bullshit to slip through the cracks by targeting very small blocs of voters.
I genuinely believe that most problems in government would be fixed if voluntary voter turnout was around 99%, and that low rates, especially during midterms, is the largest threat to democracy in the United States as we know it to date.
January 2013: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/call-time-congressional-fundr...
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
April 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congr...
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.
Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
Perhaps you mean to say: I don't see it eliminating their misconduct and behavior.
s/country/world/
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?
How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
And do consider that the supreme court has ruled that they're immune for anything that's an 'official act'.
Accountability of the executive left the room in 2024
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
The specific ruling is about the president being immune from criminal charges while in office. And yeah, you can’t be taking George Washington to court (or jail) while he is leading the revolution. It’s essential for the nation to have a functioning leader, especially among the fog of war.
The Bible story of David and Saul presents another example of this principle.
To bring it back though… what you’re telling me is we can’t trust a democracy to elect an executive.
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.
It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.
I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
You want data? https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.
As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?