U of T heads 'guerrilla archiving event' to preserve climate data ahead of Trump presidency

He's called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese. He's nominated a climate-change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency. And he doesn't believe California is in a drought.

President-elect Donald Trump isn't even in office yet, but environmentalists are deeply concerned about his views concerning climate change and the environment as a whole. Many are also worried that, once he takes office, years of climate and environmental research could be lost or much harder to access.

On Saturday,the University of Toronto, together with theUniversity of Pennsylvania, is hosting what it callsa "guerrilla archiving event" to preserve any climate and environmental data before Trump takes office. It takes place at the Faculty of Information and runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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The event coincides with the Internet Archive's End of Term 2016, a project that aims to preserve federal government information found on the internet at the end of each presidential term.

You may already be familiarwith the Internet Archive: it's home to the Wayback Machine, which searches old versions of web pages after they are updated. One of its offices is at the University of Toronto.

Volunteers welcome

The fear ofinformation being deleted isn't new. Sam-Chin Li, a government information librarian at the University of Toronto, who will be giving advice and direction to those involved on Saturday, said she was involved in archiving many federal government websitesin 2013 when the Conservatives announced an amalgamation of 1,500 sites into one. She feared that much of the information could have been lost.

Li saidthat the incoming presidency worries her.

"Access to government information is so important. It's really a foundation for a function of democracy. And we're seeing all those things disappearingin front of our eyes, so how can we stand there not working?" Li said.

We're learning that the stakesof environmental pollution are planetary.- Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

Michelle Murphy, director of the University of Toronto's Technoscience Research Unit, saidthat anyone can participate in Saturday's event. The organizersdon't just need those with tech skills, but also people who know how to research and are familiar with environmental issues.

"It's not just about those with programming/hacking skills," she said. "Ultimately this is an archival process."

Though the university doesn't have anyfirm numbers on those who will attend, as of Wednesday afternoon, the Guerrilla Archiving Facebook page had 76 people who had confirmed they wouldbe at the event.

The prospect of losingaccess to U.S. information isn't just an American problem.

"We share waters; we shareatmospheres," Murphy said. "We're learning that the stakes of environmental pollution are planetary."

A collaborative effort

Patricia Kim, a graduate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania'sPenn Program in Environmental Humanities, will be in Toronto on Saturday to participate in the event. The two universities are working together to develop a framework for other academic facilitiesto utilize. The university whose effort is called #datarefugeand will take place Jan.13 to 14 is providing short-term storage with a goal of long-term.

What we're seeing is environmentalMcCarthyism.- Patricia Kim, University of Pennsylvania

Trump's recent decision to chooseScottPruitt as head of the EPA he isknown for opposing the EPAand even suing it during his time as Oklahoma attorney general is concerning to Kim.

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"What we're seeing is environmentalMcCarthyism," said Kim.

But Kim is doing her part to safeguard existing databases and research, and she's looking forward to participating in Saturday's event.

Trump seemed to have wavered on his stance on climate change during a November visit to the office of the New York Times, saying that he'd "keep an open mind." Still, that doesn't mean he plans to soften his stance on the issue, Kim said.

That's why she's taking action now.

"Better safe than sorry."