Of course the research can be replicated - if you were a researcher working at a British university in the field of geoscience you would almost certainly be able to access the data set for your own experiments. But since it is a copyrighted data set, you still wouldn't be able to reproduce it unless you had a license. Yes, a minority of journals require data sets to be published along with the paper, but that isn't really relevant since this work isn't being published by them, and even if you had access to the data set, you would have no legal right to submit it to one of those journals.
You appear to think that the data set is public domain - in the United States it probably would be since US government works are AFAIK public domain by default. Elsewhere in the world this is not the case, and different parts of the data set will be owned by their respective parties which license them on a commercial basis.
The reluctance to release the data and the destruction of data is a red flag that something isn't kosher.
The data set is copyrighted. No data has been destroyed. If you were employed as a researcher by a British university you could almost certainly get access to the data set.
However, there's a ton of grant money to be had by the climate scientists and much power & control to be gained by government by promoting a climate crisis, so it isn't too surprising.
Most peer reviewed journals have rules that all data must be archived, and made available.
That isn't true. Most peer reviewed journals don't have rules forcing data to be made available. Pharmaceutical companies, tech companies, etc. all keep their underlying code and data secret and still manage to publish everywhere. Look at the research labs of Intel and Microsoft - they somehow manage to get hundreds of papers published every year without being forced to give away any of the underlying code, designs or other data. And it's not like they are cherry picking journals - they publish in the top journals from IEEE and others.
Do you understand that copyright law covers data sets, and that you can't just issue a Freedom of Information Act requesting that the government violate copyright law?
Here's a common situation: a pharmaceutical corporation sponsors graduate research on some drug, and as part of this they provide data sets from their own experiments and other research that they have sponsored, bought, or licensed. Now I discover that a government researcher has used this data and I disagree with their conclusions, so I put in a Freedom of Information Act request for the original data set. Do you really believe that at this point the government should just relicense the data set as public domain and hand it over to me? It would fundamentally alter the concept of copyright. Now, getting rid of copyright might not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is something that needs to be decided by society in a larger context, not in the context of one single FOI request for one data set.
Clouds - yes, difficult to simulate, they may speed up or slow down global warming, but this does not mean global warming is not happening.
Measurement uncertainty - some photos from a web site should scare me? Hmm. Let's ask some other people:
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report: Q: "Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?" A: "None at all... Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."
Gavin Schmidt: "They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset" Realclimate
The oceans are driving climate change? Hmmm, sounds like a newer version of Climate myths: The oceans are cooling. Of course there's a correlation between global warming and ocean temperature, it would be absurd if there weren't. This doesn't mean that the ocean is the driver of current global warming, and of course the ocean is a massive heat and carbon sink so it does play a part.
Gore? Surely invoking the name of a political figure in a scientific argument is just some kind of inverse appeal to authority?:-) If anyone else had mentioned "George W. Bush's ideas on global warming" I'm sure you'd be the first to point out their logical failure.
That a site is run by "climate scientists" or is not, doesn't matter.
Of course it matters. In the real world it isn't possible to independently judge the credibility of every bit of information you come across, especially if it is in a highly specialised area of research. Imagine I publish on my web site some paper claiming that black holes don't exist, that the observed data can be explained by some other properties of space, and back it up with pages of obscure mathematics, whilst at the same time admitting that I have no qualifications in physics. Now imagine that Stephen Hawking publishes a paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal. Which one is going to have more credibility? Sure, hypothetically they are the same, just a guy publishing a paper, but in the real world, reputation and education absolutely matter. It can take weeks of review to find a flaw in highly complex mathematical papers, without a reputation or evidence of formal training you will find it difficult to find a qualified person who will take you seriously.
Anyway, it's not as if the climate skeptics are above appeals to authority, they have even compiled a list of skeptic scientists, surely the highest form of an appeal to authority?
I live in the northern latitudes (Sweden). There's absolutely nothing unusual about the weather/climate today
One of the common misconceptions about "global warming" is that everywhere in the world will become warmer; this is not true, "global warming" refers to the average temperature increasing. Some places may get colder, some may get warmer, and some may stay the same. The region you live in may have a climate that hasn't changed, and it may not change in the near future, but this does not imply that the climate in the rest of the world is not changing.
The sun drives the clouds and the winds, and the ocan cycles. Those have wavelengths of 30-60 years, it seems. That coincides really well with the decades of cooling, warming, cooling and warming we've seen the last century.
The problem appears to be that the data itself was collected and supplied by various combinations of public and private entities throughout the world, and collectively released under a non-free license under which researchers aren't able to publically redistribute the data set. The British government also must respect the contract under which it obtained the data set. Now, you can argue that the data should be free in the first place, or that there should be no copyright law for data, or that there is a public interest in violating copyright law and the contractual obligations if you believe that this is a national security issue, etc.
Unfortunately the conspiracy theorists see this lack of public data as further evidence of the big conspiracy. Yes, it would be better if the complete data set were public domain. No, the data set being distributed under a less permissive license does not mean that global warming is not happening.
It should be noted that this is not a unique case - there are many instances where researchers at universities are given access to commercial or otherwise non-public-domain data sets which they use in their research and are unable to legally reproduce. Does this mean their research isn't following the scientific method? Not really - as long as other researchers are able to access the data set and reproduce the research, then it is science. The scientific method doesn't require that everyone in the world is able to reproduce your experiments, although it certainly does help.
Except it isn't done by the government, it's done by a private corporation.
Flip this around - you own a small bar, should you have the right to refuse entry to people who are likely to cause violence? It's your property, right? And in order to verify identity, shouldn't you be able to request that the person supply some ID? After all, they're free to say no and go elsewhere.
Seriously, Microsoft should just pull out of an economy of $18.394 trillion GDP? While in the meantime, the governments involved would most likely invoke the "national security" clauses in copyright treaties to allow piracy of Windows and Office, whilst simultaneously launching accelerated projects to switch to Linux asap? What do you think this would do to the MS stock price? And why should any corporation have the right to violate the laws of democratic nations anyway? Microsoft is not the only corporation to have been fined by the E.U.
It just points out the obvious conclusion that talking on a phone is a "cognitive distraction". Well duh! Read a little further "it is not possible to make a direct connection to crash risk". Okay, so we have the same old problem of correlation doesn't equal causation.
It says "The nature of those degradations and changes are symptomatic of potential safety-related problems"... Sounds very much like the old argument pushed by the tobacco lobby "the nature of degradations and changes are symptomatic of potential health-related problems, but it is not possible to make a direct connection between smoking and cancer"
In Europe it's the other way around. In the UK, a traditionally Protestant country, evolution is part of the National Curriculum and is taught to all school children as part of biology. In Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country, evolution is (as far as I know) not normally taught in schools.
True story: one day one of my Irish Christian friends asked which parts of the bible I had problems accepting. I answered that the beginning was a good start - the bit about us being "created", when we have so much evidence now of evolution. He said "What? What do you mean?" I replied "You know, the fact that we evolved from apes which evolved from animals in the sea and all that." He said that he'd never heard of this before. I was shocked - this was an otherwise well educated, 18 year old medical student who would be working as a doctor in less than 3 years, and he had never heard of the theory of evolution. And this was only a decade ago, when we all had internet access and plenty of medical text books in the library.
Without education, it's hardly surprising that there are so many people out there who still think that evolution is a lie.
Selecting a party instead of a candidate seems rather unscientific to me.
Why would voting for a party be more of a scientific endeavour? What would your hypothesis be? How would you run multiple experiments? Time travel? There are electoral systems based on voting for a party rather than an individual, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Why would this form of voting be any less scientific than another? What is the difference between voting for a set of people with a manifesto, or an individual with a manifesto (apart from the set having some redundancy)? Shouldn't votes be based on proposals to plan and structure society - proposals that stand on their own merits, rather than the person or persons making them?
Mars once had flowing rivers of water. There was warming, at some time there came a tipping point, and the planet became inhospitable. It is possible that the same could happen to Earth.
All of your points have already been addressed many times:
Most of the ardent skeptics now agree that the average temperature has increased, and may increase in the future. The view that there is no warming occurring is now held by only a small minority (afaik, there are no prominent scientists that claim warming has not and is not occurring).
You are scared of CFL bulbs because they contain a small amount of mercury - are you also scared of thermometers?
There are environmentalists who support nuclear energy as an alternative to coal and oil; it's not as radical an idea as you suggest. However, nuclear energy is not sustainable - world reserves are predicted to last a few hundred years. Assuming we can switch from oil/gas/coal to nuclear for our present needs, we still need to develop alternatives for the future.
Quite literally, we're enhancing our crop yields by burning fossil fuels. It's a minute increase in CO2, and I do mean very small. When compared with all greenhouse gases, it's not even background noise... Fossil fuels do not add to the green house gases in the atmosphere in amounts that we can even measure.
I take it you aren't a scientist? The increase in co2 is a measurable, real increase. There are physicists who measure the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with great accuracy. Why do you think that that this is not possible?
By their own accords, those who want to see greenhouse gases curtailed, are only talking about 1/20th of a degree in terms of climate change. That number is probably being generous.
Did you miss the G8 meeting a few days ago where the politicians agreed to try and limit warming to 2 degrees? Who are these serious climatologists who predict warming of only 1/20th a degree? Certainly not the IPCC reports.
Increased CO2 = Bigger, better, healthier plant life. Which will equate to more available food for the human population.
Perhaps you would like to study the atmosphere and foliation of Mars to see where this argument fails?
The numbers supporting a huge campaign to combat global climate change just simply do not add up. I hate this issue, because so many people do not look at the numbers, and believe the FUD that we've been taught since we were children. I too believed all of it, up until a couple of years ago. I took a good long look at the numbers, what was being said. Low and behold, I made my own decision, and every time I hear combating carbon emissions, well let's just say whoever said it goes down a few levels on my credibility meter.
Sounds like you've been drinking the "kool-aide", in your magical universe where we can release large amounts of a previously sequestered greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and it has no effect.
And how come it's taken almost 20 years of monopolisation of the UK pay-TV market before any government organisation has said anything? (Ofcom just announced results of its investigation)
Or maybe it's because an editor and a private investigator have already been jailed for their part in the hacking?
Or maybe because News International has already paid out over £1 million to settle court cases brought by some of the people they listened in on, on the condition that they can't say anything about the case or settlement to anybody else, ever? And News International has not denied any of the allegations?
The fact that a single, unelected individual can become as powerful as Murdoch is worrying in this day and age. After Tony Blair flew out to Australia to breakfast with Murdoch, the British tabloids switched overnight and Blair won the next election. According to the Independent, Murdoch is "so powerful that no politician dare take him on." According to Business Week:
"his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country...His cable channels include fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced or delivered."
It is worrying that, in a democratic society, any single individual can influence public opinion so convincingly that even the governing left-leaning politicians, who would be his traditional enemies, must do underhand deals in order to gain his support and stay in power.
Sure, I could buy the Topo map for around USD$250, and City Navigator for $80. Apart from the expense, there are still problems:
Despite being designed for outdoor activities, the Topo map is not so great - I have a friend who bought it for cycling and gave up after finding out it didn't include a whole load of his favourite cycle routes.
You can't try the map before buying, and after buying, there is no way to get a refund.
The Navteq digital road data is just as incomplete and buggy as Tele Atlas.
The correct way to handle different use cases is to use the same underlying dataset, but render differently, e.g. walkers get LDWP routes highlighted, cyclists get cycling routes highlighted, etc.
There is an alternative choice that does the right thing technically (single data set, multiple renderings for different use cases and GPS devices), is free to use, and based on open standards. I can extract the dataset for any area I'm planning to visit, and render my own Garmin compatible maps, highlighting whatever I want. If the dataset is incomplete or buggy, I can fix it. IMHO, this is better than any of the proprietary Garmin options.
Most of the digital mapping data misses out a lot of local features. Even the Tele Atlas data that Google maps uses is buggy and in Western Europe misses minor roads, and I've even seen it miss junctions between major roads. In Eastern Europe it often misses entire roads and cities (e.g. compare the capital of Albania on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap .
Even in Western Europe, the digital map makers miss stuff like cycle and walking trails. If you look at a detailed map like the British Ordnance Survey, which has been built upon local knowledge for hundreds of years, you'll see an amazing amount of information that is missed in the digital maps. I was surprised the first time I looked up my local area and saw that even the tiniest woods were named, and every hill was named and had elevation data. This is local data that almost no-one cares about anymore, but it still seems a shame to lose the history. I think the future is this kind of local data encoded in a modern digital open-standard format, and the only project I see doing this kind of work is OpenStreetMap.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the research can be replicated - if you were a researcher working at a British university in the field of geoscience you would almost certainly be able to access the data set for your own experiments. But since it is a copyrighted data set, you still wouldn't be able to reproduce it unless you had a license. Yes, a minority of journals require data sets to be published along with the paper, but that isn't really relevant since this work isn't being published by them, and even if you had access to the data set, you would have no legal right to submit it to one of those journals.
You appear to think that the data set is public domain - in the United States it probably would be since US government works are AFAIK public domain by default. Elsewhere in the world this is not the case, and different parts of the data set will be owned by their respective parties which license them on a commercial basis.
The reluctance to release the data and the destruction of data is a red flag that something isn't kosher.
The data set is copyrighted. No data has been destroyed. If you were employed as a researcher by a British university you could almost certainly get access to the data set.
However, there's a ton of grant money to be had by the climate scientists and much power & control to be gained by government by promoting a climate crisis, so it isn't too surprising.
Ah, the old funding conspiracy. Climate myths: It's all a conspiracy
Most peer reviewed journals have rules that all data must be archived, and made available.
That isn't true. Most peer reviewed journals don't have rules forcing data to be made available. Pharmaceutical companies, tech companies, etc. all keep their underlying code and data secret and still manage to publish everywhere. Look at the research labs of Intel and Microsoft - they somehow manage to get hundreds of papers published every year without being forced to give away any of the underlying code, designs or other data. And it's not like they are cherry picking journals - they publish in the top journals from IEEE and others.
There's no need to be condescending, Ron.
Do you understand that copyright law covers data sets, and that you can't just issue a Freedom of Information Act requesting that the government violate copyright law?
Here's a common situation: a pharmaceutical corporation sponsors graduate research on some drug, and as part of this they provide data sets from their own experiments and other research that they have sponsored, bought, or licensed. Now I discover that a government researcher has used this data and I disagree with their conclusions, so I put in a Freedom of Information Act request for the original data set. Do you really believe that at this point the government should just relicense the data set as public domain and hand it over to me? It would fundamentally alter the concept of copyright. Now, getting rid of copyright might not necessarily be a bad thing, but it is something that needs to be decided by society in a larger context, not in the context of one single FOI request for one data set.
Copyright is a complex issue, only a few hours ago Slashdot was discussing the Copyright Status of Thermodynamic Properties
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report: Q: "Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?" A: "None at all... Clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."
Gavin Schmidt: "They have not shown that those violations are i) giving measurable differences to temperatures, or ii) they are imparting a bias (and not just random errors) into the overall dataset" Realclimate
That a site is run by "climate scientists" or is not, doesn't matter.
Of course it matters. In the real world it isn't possible to independently judge the credibility of every bit of information you come across, especially if it is in a highly specialised area of research. Imagine I publish on my web site some paper claiming that black holes don't exist, that the observed data can be explained by some other properties of space, and back it up with pages of obscure mathematics, whilst at the same time admitting that I have no qualifications in physics. Now imagine that Stephen Hawking publishes a paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal. Which one is going to have more credibility? Sure, hypothetically they are the same, just a guy publishing a paper, but in the real world, reputation and education absolutely matter. It can take weeks of review to find a flaw in highly complex mathematical papers, without a reputation or evidence of formal training you will find it difficult to find a qualified person who will take you seriously.
Anyway, it's not as if the climate skeptics are above appeals to authority, they have even compiled a list of skeptic scientists, surely the highest form of an appeal to authority?
Climate myths: Human CO2 emissions are too tiny to matter should answer your question.
Climate myths: Higher CO2 levels will boost plant growth and food production
Climate myths: It's been far warmer in the past, what's the big deal?
I live in the northern latitudes (Sweden). There's absolutely nothing unusual about the weather/climate today
One of the common misconceptions about "global warming" is that everywhere in the world will become warmer; this is not true, "global warming" refers to the average temperature increasing. Some places may get colder, some may get warmer, and some may stay the same. The region you live in may have a climate that hasn't changed, and it may not change in the near future, but this does not imply that the climate in the rest of the world is not changing.
The sun drives the clouds and the winds, and the ocan cycles. Those have wavelengths of 30-60 years, it seems. That coincides really well with the decades of cooling, warming, cooling and warming we've seen the last century.
Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans
The problem appears to be that the data itself was collected and supplied by various combinations of public and private entities throughout the world, and collectively released under a non-free license under which researchers aren't able to publically redistribute the data set. The British government also must respect the contract under which it obtained the data set. Now, you can argue that the data should be free in the first place, or that there should be no copyright law for data, or that there is a public interest in violating copyright law and the contractual obligations if you believe that this is a national security issue, etc.
Unfortunately the conspiracy theorists see this lack of public data as further evidence of the big conspiracy. Yes, it would be better if the complete data set were public domain. No, the data set being distributed under a less permissive license does not mean that global warming is not happening.
It should be noted that this is not a unique case - there are many instances where researchers at universities are given access to commercial or otherwise non-public-domain data sets which they use in their research and are unable to legally reproduce. Does this mean their research isn't following the scientific method? Not really - as long as other researchers are able to access the data set and reproduce the research, then it is science. The scientific method doesn't require that everyone in the world is able to reproduce your experiments, although it certainly does help.
Except it isn't done by the government, it's done by a private corporation.
Flip this around - you own a small bar, should you have the right to refuse entry to people who are likely to cause violence? It's your property, right? And in order to verify identity, shouldn't you be able to request that the person supply some ID? After all, they're free to say no and go elsewhere.
Seriously, Microsoft should just pull out of an economy of $18.394 trillion GDP? While in the meantime, the governments involved would most likely invoke the "national security" clauses in copyright treaties to allow piracy of Windows and Office, whilst simultaneously launching accelerated projects to switch to Linux asap? What do you think this would do to the MS stock price? And why should any corporation have the right to violate the laws of democratic nations anyway? Microsoft is not the only corporation to have been fined by the E.U.
It just points out the obvious conclusion that talking on a phone is a "cognitive distraction". Well duh! Read a little further "it is not possible to make a direct connection to crash risk". Okay, so we have the same old problem of correlation doesn't equal causation.
It says "The nature of those degradations and changes are symptomatic of potential safety-related problems"... Sounds very much like the old argument pushed by the tobacco lobby "the nature of degradations and changes are symptomatic of potential health-related problems, but it is not possible to make a direct connection between smoking and cancer"
In Europe it's the other way around. In the UK, a traditionally Protestant country, evolution is part of the National Curriculum and is taught to all school children as part of biology. In Ireland, a traditionally Catholic country, evolution is (as far as I know) not normally taught in schools.
True story: one day one of my Irish Christian friends asked which parts of the bible I had problems accepting. I answered that the beginning was a good start - the bit about us being "created", when we have so much evidence now of evolution. He said "What? What do you mean?" I replied "You know, the fact that we evolved from apes which evolved from animals in the sea and all that." He said that he'd never heard of this before. I was shocked - this was an otherwise well educated, 18 year old medical student who would be working as a doctor in less than 3 years, and he had never heard of the theory of evolution. And this was only a decade ago, when we all had internet access and plenty of medical text books in the library.
Without education, it's hardly surprising that there are so many people out there who still think that evolution is a lie.
Selecting a party instead of a candidate seems rather unscientific to me.
Why would voting for a party be more of a scientific endeavour? What would your hypothesis be? How would you run multiple experiments? Time travel? There are electoral systems based on voting for a party rather than an individual, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Why would this form of voting be any less scientific than another? What is the difference between voting for a set of people with a manifesto, or an individual with a manifesto (apart from the set having some redundancy)? Shouldn't votes be based on proposals to plan and structure society - proposals that stand on their own merits, rather than the person or persons making them?
These points have been answered before:
Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998
All of your points have been answered before:
All of your points have already been addressed many times:
Quite literally, we're enhancing our crop yields by burning fossil fuels. It's a minute increase in CO2, and I do mean very small. When compared with all greenhouse gases, it's not even background noise... Fossil fuels do not add to the green house gases in the atmosphere in amounts that we can even measure.
I take it you aren't a scientist? The increase in co2 is a measurable, real increase. There are physicists who measure the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with great accuracy. Why do you think that that this is not possible?
By their own accords, those who want to see greenhouse gases curtailed, are only talking about 1/20th of a degree in terms of climate change. That number is probably being generous.
Did you miss the G8 meeting a few days ago where the politicians agreed to try and limit warming to 2 degrees? Who are these serious climatologists who predict warming of only 1/20th a degree? Certainly not the IPCC reports.
Increased CO2 = Bigger, better, healthier plant life. Which will equate to more available food for the human population.
Perhaps you would like to study the atmosphere and foliation of Mars to see where this argument fails?
The numbers supporting a huge campaign to combat global climate change just simply do not add up. I hate this issue, because so many people do not look at the numbers, and believe the FUD that we've been taught since we were children. I too believed all of it, up until a couple of years ago. I took a good long look at the numbers, what was being said. Low and behold, I made my own decision, and every time I hear combating carbon emissions, well let's just say whoever said it goes down a few levels on my credibility meter.
Sounds like you've been drinking the "kool-aide", in your magical universe where we can release large amounts of a previously sequestered greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and it has no effect.
Oh, and did I mention that Murdoch stopped broadcasting BBC News, which relied on a Newscorp satellite in China, because they refused to take part in the Tiananmen Square cover-up?
And how come it's taken almost 20 years of monopolisation of the UK pay-TV market before any government organisation has said anything? (Ofcom just announced results of its investigation)
Or maybe it's because an editor and a private investigator have already been jailed for their part in the hacking?
Or maybe because News International has already paid out over £1 million to settle court cases brought by some of the people they listened in on, on the condition that they can't say anything about the case or settlement to anybody else, ever? And News International has not denied any of the allegations?
The fact that a single, unelected individual can become as powerful as Murdoch is worrying in this day and age. After Tony Blair flew out to Australia to breakfast with Murdoch, the British tabloids switched overnight and Blair won the next election. According to the Independent, Murdoch is "so powerful that no politician dare take him on." According to Business Week:
So Murdoch owns many of the most influential TV stations and newspapers in the UK and US, and yet he pays almost no tax, only 6%. Murdoch even had a special tax credit for himself written into a US bill during the Clinton era. In the UK it was revealed that News International pays only 1.2% tax, and the governing Labour party refused to say anything on the issue.
It is worrying that, in a democratic society, any single individual can influence public opinion so convincingly that even the governing left-leaning politicians, who would be his traditional enemies, must do underhand deals in order to gain his support and stay in power.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin
Sure, I could buy the Topo map for around USD$250, and City Navigator for $80. Apart from the expense, there are still problems:
Most of the digital mapping data misses out a lot of local features. Even the Tele Atlas data that Google maps uses is buggy and in Western Europe misses minor roads, and I've even seen it miss junctions between major roads. In Eastern Europe it often misses entire roads and cities (e.g. compare the capital of Albania on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap .
Even in Western Europe, the digital map makers miss stuff like cycle and walking trails. If you look at a detailed map like the British Ordnance Survey, which has been built upon local knowledge for hundreds of years, you'll see an amazing amount of information that is missed in the digital maps. I was surprised the first time I looked up my local area and saw that even the tiniest woods were named, and every hill was named and had elevation data. This is local data that almost no-one cares about anymore, but it still seems a shame to lose the history. I think the future is this kind of local data encoded in a modern digital open-standard format, and the only project I see doing this kind of work is OpenStreetMap.