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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> 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
Exp has already said this, but that assertion – that this is “trivially true” – is certainly correct, but will be a surprise to many people here. There are plenty of people here who deny that the GHE exists, and that the warming exists.
Or have their own bizarre wacky alternative GH theory, that Lindzen would giggle at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-theory-of-climate/
REPLY: I agree the NZ theory is wacky too, and the reason I posted it was to bring in people to the conversation (Like physicist Dr. Robert Brown, Willis, and others to show just how off base it was. I figured people would learn something from the discussion, and they have. – Anthony)
“we waited, scanning, looking, wondering…..and nothing happened”
Anthony – would you rather they hadn’t fixed it?
AGW and the Y2K problem are wholly different issues and the only reason a journalist conflates them is because newspapers love doom.
The comparison, made by an Arts graduate, may be poor but Lindzen’s talk is devastatingly accurate, everyone ought to read it, most especially those whose first thought is to refuse…
Think again
MarkW says:
The UN is not to be trusted period. There- fixed.
I had experience of a Y2K bug. A well known science magazine sent me a notice to renew my subscription for zero months.. It has regular articles on computer science issues
I can’t say the Y2K bug was a non-event, as businesses worldwide spent billions to prevent a disaster. In many ways, it helped spur a revolution in IT as many businesses decided it finally made sense to move away from expensive, outdated infrastructure and into client/server distributed and web-based computing.
Was the investment worthwhile? Many businesses and governments spent a lot of money testing their systems. If there really was no problem, would they have been able to justify the expense?
Y2k like swine flu, legionella water testing, ukmo’s heat wave warning etc were all over reactions. And in the case of Y2k and water testing many people made stacks of money slaying dragons that never existed.
I note some people say that Y2k problems were pre empted . Well all I can say is, that not one person I know who couldn’t afford ‘experts’ to prepare their equipment that contained small PC’s and their actual PC’s; had any problems whatsoever. It was one large hype and the cash tills sang Hallelujah.
Add me to the list of Y2K warriors who get really, really, really, really angry at people who say the Year 2000 bug was a hoax. I was on a very large team of contract programmers, project managers, and even consultants(!) who worked pretty d@ur momisugly#m hard for three years. We got through successfully with a lot of initiative, inventiveness, imagination and skull sweat. It was definitely not “nothing”.
George V.
I certainly am not suggesting it was a hoax, only that the media coverage of it was overblown like always. – Anthony
@steveta_uk
It was RAM.
Then there was RAM and ROM.
Don’t forget Anthony:
Gleick claims that he received the two page strategy doc in the mail. USPS Inspection service should be called and set on the trail of fraud using the mail service. Call or I believe you can contact them via the web.
Lawrence says:February 24, 2012 at 10:33 am…
Lawrence, if all your experience is restricted to PCs then you may suffer from tunnel vision. However, some of us were working on the behemoth 3270 mainframes running MVS etc. That was a different ball-park, believe me.
Lawrence says:
February 24, 2012 at 10:33 am
SO those of us, who detailed steps we took to fix Y2k problems are just lying?
William M. Connolley says:
February 24, 2012 at 10:19 am
I don’t know, William. I start to believe the temperature data that shows the earth is warming (predominantly recovery from the LIA), and somebody goes and pulls out a long-term temperature record that shows no warming whatsoever.
I’ve even run into such a temperature data set that has been recorded less than 90 miles from where I live, and knowing who has kept the temperature record makes me believe it far more than some grant-seeking, government-controll advocating, document-falsifying, hysteria-mongering “climate scientist”.
So who should I believe–you or my lying eyes?
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/
The last sentence
TomB says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:15 am
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.
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.
*
Brilliant, TomB, I admire people like yourself who had the guts to examine the evidence properly and to change their thinking. My hat off to you, sir!
In 1972, I was responsible for an analysis system incorporating an HP 2100A minicoumputer. I recall that 16K of core memory (16 bit wordlength) cost the same as a new E-type Jaguar at the time. And that was a fraction of the cost of mainframe memory – so not surprising that programmers did not waste memory space.
I giggle every time I see the Y2K “certified” sticker on my light fixtures at my office. Government creating jobs at its finest. Or maybe just saved?
Re Y2K, I cited my paper above. As it’s 23 pages long, with nearly 50 end notes, I don’t suppose many people will read it. So here’s the Conclusion:
“Y2K related problems occurred widely over several years. Their effect was local and – with some unfortunate exceptions – relatively unimportant. In particular, because the vast majority of potential problems were fixed, there was no example of the catastrophic knock-on effect that some had feared and of which the Governor of the Bank of England had warned (see p.7). That there was not is largely because his and other such warnings were heeded and acted upon. Anyone who confuses such warnings with predictions, and failed predictions at that, or with scaremongering or who regards Y2K as a hoax or believes efforts to resolve it were a waste of money, hasn’t tried to understand what was, in fact, a bizarre, unnecessary but real and seriously worrying problem, resolved only because of the massive effort deployed throughout the world.”
That link again: http://qii2.info/y2k.pdf . (I deal with media reaction on page 14.)
Having waded through all of the Y2K comments, I am just wondering:
What is Britain planning to do with the information they received? Will they continue
to spend the “billions”? Or just form a committee to discuss it, like all bureaucracy?
Certainly the hype is all that is in common.
but some people in suits are probably still living on the proceeds.
That’s me.
Typhoon says: February 24, 2012 at 8:13 am
This is a very strange error.
1. When I first tried to clicking (repeatedly) on this link, I too got this error message (every time).
2. So then, I went to the Bishop-Hill blog and navigated manually to the pdf. It opened just fine.
3. Now for the strangeness, when I then retried clicking on the WUWT link, Firefox successfully opens the file every time.
Have no idea about how to fix this so that it will work for all WUWT readers on the first click.
Thanks for all your hard work. I really enjoy your site,
wermet
Mark and Snotrocket
Are you saying the work you did prevented the disaster from happening, because I’m saying that seemingly plenty of people with common PC’s or any device (which we were told could be affected) with computing power down to a lowly washing maching seemed unaffected. It just basically came out in the wash.
Glenn says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:42 am
February 24th, 2012 is a bad day for anyone still running software written in the 80s and 90s.
—————
Big institutions and especially financial institutions, are very, very, very conservative when it comes to upgrading software.
If a program is working, then there is no reason to change.
First there is the cost of the upgrade software itself. Then there is the cost of shutting down operations while the software is being upgraded. Finally there is the worry about finding all the bugs in the new software, and the worry that your operations may be shutdown because of an unanticipated incompatibility.
It is not unusual for such companies to still be using code that was first written 30 or 40 years ago.
Erp says, and many reply. Yesterday it was Connolly. Have the warmistas launched a troll-a-day program against this site?
Sun Spot says:
February 24, 2012 at 9:47 am
Let me guess, Prof. Richard Lindzens house of commons presentation didn’t make it to the Bias Broadcasting Cabal air waves.
No, Instead Monbiot and Black started spouting what a martyre Gliek is. What a warped sense of society these two half wits have. It’s ok to steal, deceive, cheat and lie as long as it is for their good cause. What a couple of a$$