Friday, December 27, 2013

Wish They Were Here

Preventable things are happening where you would expect folk like Tony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Lucia, Steve Mosher, Judith Curry and others of that direction to lend a hand in alleviating the problems. 

 First, as Eli has been talking a bit about, the Keeling Curve is under threat and needs support.  If anyone cares about climate records, this is certainly a worthy project. 

Second, JPvan Yperselee tweets that Canada is dismantling libraries that contain a great deal of original material from research projects including seven key ones owned by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.  Much is irretrievably lost

As reported by The Tyee earlier this month, key libraries dismantled by the government included the famous Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg; the historic St. Andrews Biological Station (SABS) in St. Andrews, New Brunswick (that's where famed environmental scientist Rachel Carson did some of her research for Silent Spring) and one of the world's finest ocean collections at Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John's, Newfoundland.

At the same time the government has killed research groups that depended on those libraries such as the Experimental Lakes Area, the Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission and the DFO's entire contaminants research program. The Freshwater Institute as well as the Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research (COOGER) has lost much of their funding and staff, too.
You could read this as a bit of snark, it is not.  Eli, really thinks this is the sort of thing where all sides could be on the same side.  Eli recalls reading about the need for data preservation.  Remind the others.

5 comments:

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

The Canadian's are merely following harvard's bad example.

Having dissolved the Geology Library to make way for the Center For The Environment, the local Casaubons have banished the fearsomely fishy Fearing Collection- a school of ten thousand 15th through 20th century books on all things having to do with commercial and recreational fishing to an ultramontane repository, where they will remain forever unbrowsed by angling eyes.

willard said...

You might consider saving this post as draft, keeping a copy with your emails and releasing it zipped on RC.

Words would then fail me.

Martin Vermeer said...

Sometimes good things happen too:

LOIRP

Inspirational

Bryson said...

Sorry about the libraries, but science must not be allowed to get in the way of a certain (admittedly rather shortsighted) conception of economic progress, by order of the Right "Honorable" Stephen Harper.

Anonymous said...

In my, probabely myotic view, Harper, the Honourable, is comitting a Crime Against Humanity.
Regards, wereatheist