>Do you think you will really convince a climate denier with this data

These people where convinced a pizza restaurant was the center of a global pedo ring based on nothing but deliberately misconstrued sentences they claim are code.

They'll believe whatever they want.

Agree. I think we're better off reproducing altered versions of the Bible and getting the message out that way.

(I think I'm being a smartass, btw. I think.)

I still suspect something will come out about that. It may be that "honey pot" operation the FBI was running got misconstrued, but I still bet there is some grain of truth to what was uncovered because all the other issues brought up by "anonymous FBI" pretty much came true, so that means it was someone on the inside feeding basically rumors from that organization, most of which were corroborated.

It's worth noting that not everyone who rebuffs some of the proposed actions is a climate denier. There's still some question as to the extent of human involvement. That said, smog is enough for me to be in favor of working towards renewable, less polluting energy sources. In my lifetime I've gone from having allergy-like flare ups once every few years, to now 2-3 times a year, mostly seems to follow the pollution levels not just the pollen count.

By the same token, not every "green" program is a great thing... and even in treaties, exempting the worst actors (China, India) because they are often considered third world doesn't do a lot to help the global issues. Improved working requirements as a requisite for international trade deals would go a long way towards "cleaning up."

I bring this up, as I tend to see a lot of people who question the approach, intensity, and cost getting lumped in with climate deniers.

In your first sentence which actions are you referring to?

Not OP but the general complaint is that we shouldn't switch from a cheap energy source (coal) to expensive renewables which are relatively untested at scale if the human impact of climate change is minimal or already past the point of no return. I don't personally believe this but this is a not unreasonable argument I have heard.

Contribution to climate change shouldn't be the only criteria for evaluation of an energy source. Shouldn't we also keep in mind pollution? Coal burns, it releases fine particulates into the air that cause cancer in people's lungs. Pollution sucks. We should stop talking about climate change and go back to the 70s when people were talking about pollution.

Yeah, I agree with you - there a many many reasons why we should get off fossil fuels and reduce our energy consumption beyond climate change. I was just giving an example of about the most reasonable sounding excuse for inaction in this area. Regardless of one's political views there are plenty of solutions that appeal to the full breadth of the political system but the primary thing that they can't address is oil and gas company's desire to protect quarterly growth, people's misplaced political reasoning (I'm against action because the left is for it type arguments) and the fact that some people just don't like change that may indicate the way they have previously been doing something is wrong.

I completely agree... I mainly mean that some resources are less of an impact or more cost effective than others. I'm all for working to reduce pollution for the sake of, and if that means less carbon in the air, awesome. However, if your goal is really reducing some footprints then what materials are used/needed for construction and distribution have a huge impact. Not to mention the infrastructure security of potentially key infrastructure (power grid) relying on parts from an adversarial foreign state.

I'm not against trying to replace high polluting resources like coal... I am saying, that perhaps the investment in public solar grids make a lot less sense in many areas, and there is a relatively big impact in mining the materials and shipping the panels, many of which come from China, which is bad about clean build, not to mention shipping itself.

Likewise, trying to push for electric cars doesn't make a lot of sense in that the environmental impact of an electric car takes 5+ years to outweigh that of a gas car, not counting how the electricity is generated. Also, not accounting for the overall impact of replacing said batteries, or other maintenance.

And yes, cost is another issue... depending on what is the replacing technology, there are other cost-benefit analysis that should be done on a case by case bases against the larger impact. I also feel that if we take the premise at reducing pollution, vs. "omg the world is going to die" kind of reactionism it's a bit easier to sell more broadly to conservatives.

Fighting/reducing pollution should be enough of a goal by itself, a large enough portion of the population lives in large enough cities to understand smog and feel it when breathing, some cities far worse than others. The broader (saving the world) mentality doesn't do much on its' own, is much harder to sell, and too big.

I'm not the OP either, but there are also proposed carbon credits schemes that they might be referring to as well.

This. Although I don't think your allergy flare-ups have a direct causation there--it could just be you're aging. There's ten million variables.

I'm tired of the whole "you're a denier" shibboleth--there very well may be very strong negative human impact on the climate. I'm sure there is. Whether it is global is another question and whether it is stoppable is yet another. But what I most disgusted by is how the issue is used as a political weapon to basically implement a far left, collectivist agenda worldwide. It's like the old-school soviets found a new angle on justifying their desire for total control over populations. It will not stand.

How successful is the effort to convince clinate deniers as of right now? I see this as an archival effort. If the source is destroyed, this data, among everything else being archived, will still be around and publicly accessible by anyone who wants to use for any purpose. That is inherently important. That said, once the first part is well taken care of I'm a big advocate for building more refined systems for storing and verifying the information.

I work for a digital archives project and we're concerned about similar issues of provenance. Our way of dealing with this has been to structure our archives as JSON-formatted text in Git repositories, with binaries managed by git-annex.

Git uses hashes for everything: files are placed in .git/objects/ by their hash, each commit lists the hashes of files in the working directory, and each commit points to the hash(es) of its parent(s)

Using Git it's possible to verify the integrity of the entire repository and its history, making it impossible to tamper with without leaving traces. It's also possible to have multiple copies (clones) of the data and to verify that they are exactly the same.

If you have a copy of such a collection you can compare it against a copy held by the originating institution. If that becomes impossible for some reason, then if you can track down any of the original files you could prove that that portion of the data is correct, which lends trust to the rest of the collection.

Of course, it's possible this would not convince a die-hard trump supporter. /s