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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As a programmer who worked with financial institutions in the years prior to Y2k, I can assure you that it was a real problem. However banks had been working on this problem for years. Mortgage institutions were among the first to have problems, Mortgages written in 1970 would mature in 2000. Trying to calculate the proper interest was tough when the computer kept telling you that your loan period was negative 70 years. For a few months, mortgage calculations were done by hand and manually entered, then the updated software was distributed. (Of course back then, not much was automated yet anyway, so it wasn’t that big an inconvenience.) My company worked with check sorting machines, with a proprietary control language. We had a command for date validation, that only supported a two digit date. We had to add a new command to the language that supported a 4 digit date, and then get the update to our customers with enough lead time that they could update their sort patterns to use the new command. We were done by early 1998.
I am another one of the ex-geeks who fixed the very real Y2K issue.
The comparison is a bad one.
If the AGW crowd had been in charge of the Y2K programme the fix would have been to persuade everyone to think of the children and stop using computers.
In the Independent?
This is what winning looks like. Previously shuttered doors start to open, accompanied by a crescendo of hate and dirty tricks from the warmists…
Now would be a good time to raise a glass to Steve McKintyre and the memory of John Daly, who stood alone and fought for what was right when there was no other dissenting voice in the world….
The Y2K problem was real. The Y2K hysteria was overblown.
AGW is real. AGW hysteria is overblown.
Lindzen’s presentation is clear on what is real and what is most likely exaggeration.
Exp says:
February 24, 2012 at 8:37 am
I’m a bit stunned as to how people can become so disturbingly self-deluded.
====================================
Every day less and less people believe in global warming…
..as less believe, you will be left with the lowest common denominator
Don’t be the last one Exp……………..
While I was working on the Y2K problem (not really a bug, since the code worked as designed, just not for long enough) I was really annoyed by the stupidity of the mass media commentary on the matter.
For example, when one BBC presenter asked an expert what we should do when toasters, fridges, and washing mahines, and ovens all failed as these days they all contain computers, the expert wisely pointed out that none of his own kitchen appliances even know what year it is, so he wasn’t sure why the question has been raised.
Here is the lecture that gave rise to the Y2K analogy , by the way.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
Apparently even the soft-headed parliamentarians were impressed. It must be remember that in Britain the Conservative politicians are just enthusiastic about AGW taxation and lifestyle penalties as Labour.
In the early days of computing, memory was very, very expensive. Quite literally, dollars per byte of RAM. I don’t remember how much memory those big reel to reel tapes held, but it wasn’t a lot compared to newer systems. Those big removeable disk drives with multiple platters that you see in a lot of old movies, those only held a few 10’s of meg of data, and cost thousands of dollars.
So saving two bytes per record saved the banks a lot of money. Back in those days, Y2K was still 40 to 50 years off, and nobody gave it much thought.
In hind sight, 2 digit years may look like a bad mistake, but given the economics of early computers, it made a lot of sense.
“If Lindzen is right, we will never be able to calculate the trillions that have been spent on the advice of “scientists in the service of politics”.”
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/22/is-catastrophic-global-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/
My goodness… Misinformation here?
In the early days of computing a SINGLE DIGIT was used to save storage space — which was quite expensive in them thar days.
One of the most significant advances in computing was the TWO DIGIT year.
It was all a horrible trick (tm cs) perpetrated by cost accountants.. I swear. I was there! Believe in me!
Uh sorry — just the climate scientist in me coming out with that last line…
GogogoStopSTOP says:
February 24, 2012 at 8:29 am
4. Any UN body is not to be trusted.
Fixed it for you.
harrywr2 says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:00 am
“January 19th, 2038 is going to be a really bad day for anyone still running software written in the 1980′s and 1990′s.”
February 24th, 2012 is a bad day for anyone still running software written in the 80s and 90s.
Seems to me this analogy between y2k and AGW is only appropriate to the bellicose reaction of the scaremongering press to both issues. The analogy doesn’t fit so well describing the motivations behind the truly involved players.
Let me guess, Prof. Richard Lindzens house of commons presentation didn’t make it to the Bias Broadcasting Cabal air waves.
“Describing” probably should have been “concerning”. 🙂
I remember talking to some old COBOL programmers who though retired, were called back in to fix legacy programs that were still running, but hadn’t been touched in years. Good times for them.
I have an old server sitting in the next room. I can shovel some coal into its boiler and pull out 5,000+ lines of Y2k bugs from just one widely-used MRP/ERP application of the 1980’s and 1990’s… one of my projects in 1999 was to ensure Y2k compliance in that application which meant changes to nearly every code module of the application.
In 1998, I went through the cheque and ATM functions of a banking system. The 10,000 lines harboured several hundred Y2k problems along with a quiltwork of bugs to enhance older bugs. Some of the bugs would have been catastrophic because the data representation is records with fixed-width fields. The last digit of the year (having 3 digits instead of the expected 2) would, in one case, have caused the last digit of an account number to have slipped into the amount field; in the millions-of-dolars position.
Non-catastrophic bugs were visible on the WWW until at least 2008 (or “108” as it appeared on the page) with web pages using old scripts to produce a 2-gidit year from the 4-digit. Which substracted 1900 from the year because “that will always give a 2-digit year”.
Just pathetic, amateurish programming practices. Modulo functions existed long before the code was written.
The media greatly sensationalised, perhaps egged on by Y2k-conslutants in a feeding frenzy; who seemed more obsessed with filling in forms to cover their @rses than fixing the known problems.
“In the early days of computing, memory was very, very expensive. Quite literally, dollars per byte of RAM.”
RAM? I assume you mean core.
Exp, thanks for stopping by. We can imagine how the events of this week might be really bothering the faithful of the House of Catastrophic Warming. Hopefully having delivered your drive-by insults here at WUWT has made you feel a little better.
Please do come back any time we can be of service to you in any way.
MarkW, February 24, 2012 at 9:38 am:
Mark, IIRC from my time in the field, the reel to reel tapes (you probably mean 3420s) could manage 7MB, unless they were dual density. The 3330 discs could manage up to 300M a spindle. The earlier 2314 discs held a lot less and their heads were driven by hydraulics!!! (I can remember setting them up!) And a 40KB BOM (ferrite core) storage unit needed a sack-truck to install it.
(Puts swinging lantern away….)
Core was also RAM. (Random Access Memory)
BTW: The first thing that the Y2k bug revealed was that so many people didn’t know when the millennium actually started.
The second thing was that very few programmers correctly coded for a leap year; it wasn’t just the 1st of January which was problematic.
Loving this from the slide presentation (final slide): “Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating.”
Brent S underscores the wisdom of Dr. Lindzen’s comparison of AGW and Y2K;
Y2K, thanks to a modest amount of effort was a non-event. AGW, with a modest amount of adaptation, will be the same.
The other part, of course is that Y2K parasites, just like AGW parasites, did a lot of rent seeking to cash in on the crisis of the year.
OT
Galveston biodiesel plant blew up last night.
http://dev2000.firefighternation.com/article/news-2/crude-oil-tank-explodes-galveston-biodiesel-plant