I remember vividly the panic leading up to year 2000. People were racing to Y2K their computers and systems. TV news crews had reporters stationed at bank machines, at train traffic centers in NYC, at airports, all waiting to see if the machines and the computers that run them, stopped working when the clock went from 1999 23:59:59 to 2000 00:00:00 because in the early days of programming, to save memory, they used two digit years instead of four, and the fear was that computers would reset themselves to the year 1900 rather than 2000, and stop functioning.
I remember being in the TV newsroom (as it was mandatory for all staff to be there that night) as the millennium crept up in each time zone on our satellite feeds…we waited, scanning, looking, wondering…..and nothing happened. The bug of the millennium became the bust of the millennium. That story was repeated in every news bureau worldwide. After all the worry and hype, nothing happened. Not even a price scanner in Kmart failed (a testament to the engineers and programmers that solved the issue in advance). We grumbled about it spoiling our own plans and went home. With “nothing happening” other than tearful wailing from Bill McKibben, subsidized anger from Joe Romm, self immolation for the cause by Gleick, pronouncements of certainty by the sabbaticalized Michael Mann, and failed predictions from scientist turned rap sheet holder Jim Hansen, CAGW seems to be a lot like Y2K.
Simon Carr of the Independent, after hearing a lecture by MIT professor Dr. Richard Lindzen, thinks maybe global warming and Y2K have something in common. He writes:
At a public meeting in the Commons, the climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT made a number of declarations that unsettle the claim that global warming is backed by “settled science”. They’re not new, but some of them were new to me.
Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.
Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”
Full story here
h/t to WUWT reader Ian Forrest
Bishop Hill has a copy of Dr. Lindzen’s slide show for his talk here
(Update: some people having trouble with the link to Bishop Hill’s – so I’ve made a local copy of Linzden’s talk here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/rsl-houseofcommons-2012.pdf )
Josh Livetooned the talk – have a look at his work here
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Ironcially, the AGW problem has the same fix. Adjust the computers to more accurately reflect the true state of things. Smaller scale, too.
First the American public decided that AGW was of little concern, even if it existed. They were ridiculed. Then the Australian public. The leftwing politicians broke every campaign promise and decided to dismantle manufacturing and mining through bizarre taxes. But when the mainstream German media expressed doubt, things became dicey for the Warmists. And now we have mainstream British papers carefully voicing the same opinion as the American public. Even if true, the effect is trivial. Hmmmm. That is just a very careful way of saying that AGW may not be true at all. A step back without the admission that one had been taken in.
The Y2K proponents spent millions of dollars successfully mitigating a very real problem. It was a herculean but achievable task and it was indeed achieved to a level of 95% or more.
The AGW proponents propose spending trillions of dollars to mitigate a non-problem. Under the best estimates, these efforts will likely be less than 1% successful.
The similarities are striking, NOT.
NoAstronomer says:
February 24, 2012 at 8:04 am
Err… the millennium bug was not a mistake, at least not in that sense.
It had been a common programming practice to store many ‘dates and times’ as the number of seconds since 1970. I made some nice money just setting the system clock to 2001 and demonstrating that nothing ‘untoward’ would happen. Then I made even more ‘nice money’ verifying at the code level that 2000 was not a trigger for anything.
January 19th, 2038 is going to be a really bad day for anyone still running software written in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
Exp says: (February 24, 2012 at 8:37 am)
(…) I know Anthony, You have an answer for that and will not allow the comment. Confirmation.
Sorry, Exp, exactly what point did your ‘comment’ ‘confirm’? 🙂
I believe that at least part of the AGW scare is intentional, not a mistake.
Like Mike´s Nature trick to hide the decline. Not possible to happen by chance.
There were some real Y2K bugs. My brother worked on some embedded systems (for things like sewage treatment plants) and found that almost all his and his predecessors work had the bug, and many systems would freeze in whatever their state was at the roll-over. So, pumps that were on would run until they went dry and burned out, pumps that were off would stay off, etc. It turned out that the solution was nearly trivial – turn them off just before midnight (system time), and turn them on afterwords, and re-enter the system time. Their equipment suffered no problems, but only because they investigated it and did a bit of testing in the months leading up to it. I’ve heard stories of lots of other similar, small-time bugs that were dealt with the same way.
AGW is a different kettle of fish – different time scale, vastly different number of variables, how much money needs to be spent to change the outcome, etc. The main similarity is that it’s not sufficiently well understood by the people that are hyping it the most.
Of all the places to find such a paper, it’s in Nature
The case for open computer programs
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/full/nature10836.html#/challenges-are-no-excuse-for-closed-code
“We argue that, with some exceptions, anything less than the release of source programs is intolerable for results that depend on computation. The vagaries of hardware, software and natural language will always ensure that exact reproducibility remains uncertain, but withholding code increases the chances that efforts to reproduce results will fail.”
One must always be careful with analogies, because two separate issues are never fully alike, but in this case, I think there are enough similarities to make the analogy useful. The fundamental similarities between Y2K and CAGW:
1. There are some real issues.
2. In the publicity, the root issues and their implications were not explained well
3. Alarmists blew the issue all out of proportion
4. Many of the alarmists had a vested interested in exaggerating the problem.
In the case of Y2K, there were many software programs that would not behave properly when comparing dates that were on the opposite side of Jan 1 2000. It was a “rollover” problem, as we in the software business say. (I deal with rollover issues in different contexts in my company’s own software all the time.) But once found, the fix for any given date comparison was trivial. And once you knew what you were looking for, it became very easy to find the comparisons.
A friend of mine whose full time job at the time was maintenance of this type of software told me in the midst of the hoopla in 1999, “People don’t realize how many bugs of this magnitude we find and fix every day.” The Y2K bugs were a very small fraction of what he worked on that year. Compare this to greenhouse climate variability and other sources of climate variability — generally all you hear about in the media are the greenhouse effects.
Then people who stood to benefit financially from the issue started promoting the apocalyptic line. There were several classes of these people. Internally, many IT folks used the scare to convince technically unsophisticated upper management to purchase the brand new computer systems and software they had always wanted but never been able to justify before. And external consultants justified huge fees to find and fix these bugs by scaring the bejeezus out of management.
The apocalyptic story line that all sorts of software necessary for civilized life as we know it was going to grind to a halt on Jan 1 2000 if fixes were not made, overwhelming our ability to fix them was just never going to happen. Many of the bugs manifested themselves well before 2000. For instance, in 1996 and 1997, many people got credit cards whose expiration date was in 2000 or later. When they tried to use them, some programs rejected the cards as expired, treating the expiration dates as being around 1900. A problem, yes, but quickly and easily fixed. Many other bugs did not manifest themselves until significantly later. We found one we had missed in the summer of 2000 when we released a new revision of one piece of software, and saw that another piece of software that compared the date of this revision to older revisions got it wrong. We changed one line of that program and fixed the problem.
So a real issue, yes. Apocalyptic potential, no. (Although some companies, particularly financial services companies, would have been in a world of hurt if they had not found most of the bugs in time.) In general, organizations that treated Y2K as just one issue of many that deserved attention fared as well as those that went into expensive crisis mode.
The crisis atmosphere turned out to be very destructive financially. All the new computer hardware and software purchased in 1998 and 1999 led to a complete drying up of the market in 2000 and the next few years. I don’t think it has ever really been acknowledged how much this contributed to what is widely called the “dot-com bust” of those years.
Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.
================================================
Well, I felt it…………. 😉
Exp says:
February 24, 2012 at 8:37 am
“Gotta love the banner on Watts’ site here as the purest of ironies. Post after post of anti-AGW propaganda and politics.
Sorry fellas, but one way skepticism is not scientific skepticism.”
Exp, if you actually cared to read the comments under past posts, nearly every alternative theory that tries to explain 20th century warming or predict some future climate is mercilessly criticized just as CO2AGW is, so, no, you are not at RealClimate here. Of course each of those theories has their believers. But I hope even they are more open to criticism than the RealClimate fellows who always find that CO2 is the almighty control knob for everything.
The Y2K problem was real – the Y2K media hysteria was not. I remember some predictions of an economic collapse due to large scale systems failure. Some scaremongers shifted a lot of books, I guess.
Amazing how many things you got wrong in so short a post. You state “one way skepticism is not scientific skepticism” where a number of those commenting have disagreed with the premise of the blog post.
You state the site is loaded with “anti-AGW propaganda and politics” and sarcastically state “Oh yes, you guys are the good guys!” Wouldn’t take long to point you to posts where AGW scepticism is shared by people of various political leanings.
I’m a bit stunned as to how you could be so disturbingly deluded and buy into the Group Think on AGW alarmism. I once thought as you and researched the issue so I could thoughtfully debunk those “anti-science deniers of global warming”. To my surprise, the more I looked into it the less I could continue to swallow the party line.
Claiming the Y2K bug did not exist is almost as bad as saying that CO2 is a problem. There was a problem with many legacy programs, and it was fixed. That is why nothing happened.
If you get a stomack ulcer and your doc gives you medication and you then don’t barf blood up, you don’t say the doc was wrong because nothing happened.
As several here already said, there were some real problems with the Y2K bug, but these were solved long before midnight at the end of 1999. It was the only night ever I had to be at work, to do nothing than wait for something that I did know wouldn’t happen, instead of being with my family.
But some firms have made a lot of money by scaring people to buy new computers, software, etc. just like now with the global warming scare…
1980 – 1992 there was a lack of volcanoes and total VEI was down considerably. Takes Earth a while to warm up, takes a while to cool off when volcanic activities resume. Go by individual years, http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_eruptions.cfm you can see something naturally cyclical going on. If I ever retire maybe I’ll have time to work on something to show. Unless GeoLurking nails it down sooner. Which would be fine by me.
Curt says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:07 am
“The crisis atmosphere turned out to be very destructive financially. All the new computer hardware and software purchased in 1998 and 1999 led to a complete drying up of the market in 2000 and the next few years. I don’t think it has ever really been acknowledged how much this contributed to what is widely called the “dot-com bust” of those years.”
Interesting point. But I don’t think it contributed much – Computer sales are cyclical by nature. And most overvalued companies whose names we don’t remember anymore (uh, let me think of one, how about… letsbuyit ? I think that was one name) never had a viable business or an actual product. The actual hardware makers didn’t suffer that terribly. They also went from ridiculously overvalued to overvalued as usual which looked like a bust, but the actual companies continued to operate. The ones that had products and a market.
Make that 1991 please.
@ur momisugly Exp
This is one of the few places that your comments will not be deleted. Your more than welcome to join in on the discussions.
Just to put this article in its proper perspective, the Independent is the Greenest of Green publications – with every newspaper produced on recycled paper and offset with a newly planted tree, and three herrings given to a seal.**
Thus this is a little bit like Al Gore declaring he has doubts about AGW.
** Fish are not cuddly, so its ok to kill them.
.
“Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true…”
Funny. Anthony keeps posting articles and comment that tries to counter this trivially true science.
REPLY: Funny, and you keep posting trivial snark without having the courage to put your name to it – Anthony
Y2K: I was there. And as many here say, it was something that had to be fixed – and was. The fact that it was then a non-story for the MSM meant that it had to be trashed and the many years of work done by legions of programmers and systems managers was dumped in history’s shredder.
To compare Y2K with CAGW is a nonsense. You can’t be clever enough to know that CAGW is a scam, yet stupid enough not to know that Y2K had the potential for great disruption. Then again, if another Y2K was occurring today I guess that people like WWF, Greenpeace and Gillard would be telling us that a tax on digital clocks would fix it!
Y2K was mo mistake! I busted my tail for nearly 2 years (while trying to raise a teenager as a single parent) to insure that issues where solved before the clock struck midnight. All possible problem types were identified and categorized., Mitigation strategies were developed for those categories., And software engineers worked wonders to insure that the problems were solved.
In a way, this was an ideal problem. All issue types fit in a few well understood categories, It was also measurable and corrective actions were testable. We identified problems partly by time warping the system, fake it out tho think it was 2000 etc. Thing REALLY did break when we did this. After our actions, they did not break.
It pisses me off when non-programmers claim that it was a scam because we fixed the problem and planes did not fall out of the sky. The fact that almost every corporation in the world spent a huge amount of money in mitigation, should demonstrate that this was a problem, because despite the leftie propaganda corporations are not flushed with cash and need to spend it wisely in order to stay in business.
Lots of comments above (by NoAstronomer, Traciatim, RHS, John Arthur, John Morgensen, BrentS, Robin, Guenier, Carmen D’oxide, Rolf) have done a great job pointing out how silly the title of that Independent blog post (not an article) is by saying that the Y2K issue was a mistake. I have very little to add except to ask those who haven’t read the posts above to go back and do so now.
The Y2K Hype was the result of interested parties introducing and exploting many peoples inability to understand the difference between time and duration. Yes there were Time related issues, mortgage schedules, 5 year treasury notes and the like, but there was Never a Duration issue, microwave ovens, cars, TV, Radio, the internet etc. The Y2K Hype sold newspapers and advertising, it simply created profit from fear. In this aspect it was no different than alarmist climate science is today. Yes, there were some software problems related to Time, but no one would be ‘worried’ about the bank loosing track of their mortgage, so the ‘they’ linked it to your car, your TV and the microwave oven.