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I am an Arctic researcher. Donald Trump is deleting my citations
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: April 2nd, 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/28/arctic...
As an Arctic researcher, Im used to gaps in data. Just over 1% of US Arctic waters have been surveyed to modern standards. Over the past two months though, Ive been navigating a different type of uncharted territory: the deleting of what little data we have by the Trump administration. At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct links on 21 January. The US National Strategy for the Arctic, the Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links turned red, I frantically combed the internet for archived versions of our countrys most important polar policies. This disappearing act had just begun. Since January, the surge has transformed into a slow, incessant march of deleting datasets, webpages and policies about the Arctic. I now come to expect a weekly email request to replace invalid citations, hoping that someone had the foresight to download statistics about Arctic permafrost thaw or renewable energy in advance of the purge. Each defunct page is an effort ... to deliberately undermine our ability to make good policy decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence. In a remote region where data is already scarce, we need publicly available government guidance and records now more than ever before. It is hard enough for modern Arctic researchers to perform experiments and collect data to fill the gaps left by historic scientific expeditions. We dont have time to fill new data gaps created by political malice.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about government corruption and climate change.
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