Here’s Here are some reviews:
Blooming brilliant. Devastating” – Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“…shines a hard light on the rotten heart of the IPCC” – Richard Tol, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change and convening lead author of the IPCC
“…you need to read this book. Its implications are far-reaching and the need to begin acting on them is urgent.” – Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Donna writes on her blog:
Two editions of my IPCC exposé are now available.
The Kindle e-book is here – at Amazon.com for the reasonable price of $4.99 USD.
UK readers may purchase it for £4.88 from Amazon.co.uk here.
German readers can buy it from Amazon.de for EUR 4,88.
French readers may buy it at the same price here at Amazon.fr.
If you don’t own a Kindle you can read this book on your iPad or Mac via Amazon’s free Kindle Cloud Reader – or on your desktop or laptop via Kindle for PC software.
Digital option #2 is a PDF – also priced at $4.99. Formatted to save paper, it’s 123 standard, printer-sized pages (the last 20 of which are footnotes). Delivered instantly, it avoids shipping costs and is a comfortable, pleasant read.
A 250-page paperback edition priced at $20 should be available by the end of next week from Amazon.com – which ships internationally.
Amazon has posted a sample of the book that extends well into Chapter 7. Click here to take a peek.
h/t to Bishop Hill
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“It was exaggerated. If you look at the money spent by country, you will find there was no relationship between the amount spent and Y2K problems encountered. ”
If IT staff don’t do their job and bad things happen, people complain that they ignored a problem.
If IT staff do their job so bad things don’t happen, people complain that they exaggerated a problem.
They just can’t win.
As for 2038, Linux at least seems to have been using 64-bit times for a few years. Windows is screwed by backward compatibility, but so long as Microsoft switched to 64-bit times for 64-bit programs there won’t be many old 32-bit programs running by then.
That said, with the high precision timers available on modern computers some people have been talking about storing times to nanosecond precision, which would mean that 64 bits would run out in a few hundred years.
Oh? It was _not_ an exaggerated scare?
Weren’t financial institutions prior to Dec. 31st, 1999 doing projections (like loan amortization schedules) beyond the year 2000?
No future-value-of-money calculations on any kind of note into the future?
I would be surprised, highly surprised I say, to find the answer was “no” …
Any concern of ’embedded controllers’ was moot too (dates might be used for reporting purposes, but not operationally; internal hardware ‘timers’ used for anything require time hash marks/interrupts), and Telco marches pretty much to their own ‘beat’ on account of on-going “Bell System Practices” and that would have included coding concerns (standards) going forward …
.
Might be inclined to download the PDF, but it’s hard to leave that lying on the table in the faculty lounge. I’ll wait for the hard copy. : > )
Is it just a coincidence that “The Delinquent Teenager” illustrated on the cover of the book looks like I imagine one Barack H. Obama did back in his “blow” days in Hawaii? Similarly the introduction rings eerily familiar.
This is a must have book. It should put a torpedo in the New World Order battleship IPCC.
I still don’t see how I was impolite, but thanks for fixing it.
On-topic, I look forward to buying this book when I get my Kindle Fire for Xmas 😉
[REPLY: No, Jeff, I did not mean to imply that you were impolite… although pedantics like us can sometimes appear that way to people who place a higher value on tact than correct grammar. Just keep in mind that Anthony does a lot of this stuff on the fly, juggling a family and business as well as researching tons of climate, weather, and science related stuff. He multi-tasks with a vengeance. -REP]
“Weren’t financial institutions prior to Dec. 31st, 1999 doing projections (like loan amortization schedules) beyond the year 2000?”
Y2K wasn’t about Excel spreadsheets, it was primarily about the big iron that does the work behind the scenes running software written decades ago when storage was expensive and everyone knew their crappy COBOL code would be replaced well before 2000 so there was no point worrying about whether it would continue to work. I remember reading about several major issues with such systems that had to be fixed, particularly, if I remember correctly, in inter-bank messaging using two-digit dates.
“Any concern of ‘embedded controllers’ was moot too (dates might be used for reporting purposes, but not operationally; internal hardware ‘timers’ used for anything require time hash marks/interrupts)”
Never underestimate the stupidity of programmers, or the lack of processing, storage and communications capacity of old hardware.
Again, it’s more than ten years since this mattered so I’ve forgotten the details, but I remember reading about a railway signalling system which simply didn’t work when the year was 00 because someone had decided that a year of 00 was the way they’d report an error. Fortunately Y2K caused someone to look at the system and they discovered and fixed the problem before it stopped working on January 1st.
Anyway, this is getting off-topic, other than to point out that comparing Y2K to CAGW is a great disservice to the people who spent a lot of time ensuring that bad things didn’t happen.
Here is the skinny on a Windows XP service pack 3 or newer system with regards to the System.DateTime:
“The DateTime value type represents dates and times with values ranging from 12:00:00 midnight, January 1, 0001 Anno Domini (Common Era) through 11:59:59 P.M., December 31, 9999 A.D. (C.E.).
Time values are measured in 100-nanosecond units called ticks, and a particular date is the number of ticks since 12:00 midnight, January 1, 0001 A.D. (C.E.) in the GregorianCalendar calendar (excluding ticks that would be added by leap seconds). For example, a ticks value of 31241376000000000L represents the date, Friday, January 01, 0100 12:00:00 midnight. A DateTime value is always expressed in the context of an explicit or default calendar.”
14 Oct: Forbes: William Pentland: The Post-Normal Seduction of Climate Science
Now, the climate-science community is scrambling to crack the code on the “uncertainty” conundrum. Exhibit A: the October 2011 issue of the journal Climatic Change, the closest thing in climate science to gospel truth, which is devoted entirely to the subject of uncertainty.
While I have yet to digest all of the dozen or so essays, I suspect they are only the opening salvo in what is will soon become a robust debate about the significance of uncertainty in climate-change science. The first item up on the chopping block is called post-normal science (PNS)…
While it pains me to admit this, I am increasingly convinced that the IPCC’s role in assessing the science of climate change needs to be scaled back. The IPCC was an overly optimistic experiment in international governance designed for a world that never materialized… http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2011/10/14/the-post-normal-seduction-of-climate-science/
Thanks so much for posting this Anthony.
Fantastic Donna. Thank you for doing the rigorous work and putting pen to paper.
Congratulations.
Just downloaded and will enjoy reading your work this weekend.
REP: …pedantics like us…
Sigh…. : > )
[REPLY: I was wondering if anyone would notice. -REP]
Print out and bind the PDF. That’s what Portable Document Format is set up for, actually.
Jeff Alberts says:
October 14, 2011 at 7:33 pm
NOTE: OK. OK. It’s fixed….
Thanks for fixing it. While I am astounded at the quantity and quality of Anthony’s (and other contributor’s) output, I have to agree with Jeff. If we’re supposed to be able to accept corrections of our science, we should also accept corrections in our grammar. And being the leadoff line….
Regarding Y2K: “It was exaggerated. If you look at the money spent by country, you will find there was no relationship between the amount spent and Y2K problems encountered. ” I respectfully disagree that it was exaggerated. And the REAL question should be: What was the relationship between the amount spent and Y2K problems averted? We’ll never know.
Unfortunately, this book will have very little effect.
Some AGW true believer will find one or two inaccuracies in the book and it will become “debunked”.
You will read postings such as:
“You’re actually quoting from that debunked screed?”
Well done Donna.
Got a copy from Amazon and am 20% through.
Enjoying.
I can’t read the preview at Amazon with Firefox or Opera. There is some Javascript problem, and yes I do have Java enabled.
Would some kind person be able to post the preview in plain text somewhere. Here would be a good place.
Never mind, Internet Explorer shows the preview.
Purchased. $4.99 is such a small price to pay for a little balance on a politically crooked excuse to cash grab.
Think of it as an investment in rationality.
Can’t wait to read this one!
I am already fired up and I haven’t even ordered it yet.
Thanks WUWT and Bishop Hill for the heads up. I am sure it will be suppressed in the main media….and all the more reason to BUY IT.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
MarkG says that references to Y2K are off topic. Unfortunately, they’re not: Donna adopts a tone of objective rationality – looking at the evidence as it really is, not as “interpreted” by others. And it does seem that she has done that in this book – I certainly hope so. But, unfortunately, there’s a flaw: by characterising Y2K as no more than an exaggerated scare and thereby drawing a parallel with CAGW, she fails to meet her own high standard. I suggest that anyone who disagrees should read my paper: http://qii2.info/y2k.pdf.
Anybody worried yet about the y10k problem? Oh, that’s right, the hockey stick will have turned this earth into a sun by then.
Thanks,I’m already read this book,and i thinks….it great!
Dave Springer says:
October 14, 2011 at 3:34 pm
I was a BIOS programmer at Dell computer from 1993-2000. I actually coded the fix for about 50 million computers circa 1998. Everyone knew how overblown it was.
———————
Y2K made me a very rich man back in the nineties. Most programmers back then knew it was bogus, but why tell that when companies were willing to pay up to three times our normal consulting rates for fixing it. Maybe I am beginning to understand why climate scientists react as they do.
I read this in one sitting. It is very good in the sense that it should convince laypeople that the IPCC has mislead us all. After reading the book even a layperson will be left with absolutely no doubt that a SCAM has been perpetrated. There is no science in this book and this is probably a good thing as the science about global temperatures 100 years into the future is nothing but idle pointless speculation anyway.
The only thing missing is a deeper exploration of motives – clearly the desire for power at the UN is one theme she explores and the kudos given to young graduates is another, but Donna neither examines the money trail linking NGOs, like the WWF, and their funding to the UN, nor the linkages between alarmist papers and increases in government funding for academic research (although this subject is mentioned by one scientist she quotes).
” I respectfully disagree that it was exaggerated. And the REAL question should be: What was the relationship between the amount spent and Y2K problems averted? We’ll never know.
Indeed, but the fact that few serious problems occured in the many systems which had no Y2K work done on them indicates the scale of the problem was exaggerated.
Then there were the endless dire scenarios of what could happen. Best selling books about how modern society would grind to a halt for months.
The parallel with CAGW is that Y2K showed there is a large uncritical market for anthropogenic disasters. Y2K also showed that many people would happily swallow their principles for the money.
The writing seems a little unsophisticated at first (yada, yada?) but don’t let the messy plate keep you from enjoying each and every delicious tidbit. It tightens up as she goes on. I’m half way through and astonished at all the information she brings, including names, dates and clear analysis! $4.99? A Bargain!