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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alisonmrobinson says:
February 24, 2012 at 11:28 am
British parlementarians are expert at forming committees. Ones that are either very small with a known clique or very large so you never get to the decision. Expert they are.
An unimportant, but very amusing, thing DID happen at 00:00:00 1 January 2000. I visited the website of The US Naval Observatory, which is as described on their site “serves as the official source of time for the U.S. Department of Defense and a standard of time for the entire United States.”
The date shown was 1 January 1900.
This was the website’s clock, of course, and not the actual “atomic clock” time — but you’d have thought that if anybody had put the Y2K fix in, it would have been them.
Another thing in common – sloppy programming …
( date / computer models )
Here’s a Y2K related climate issue:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/08/08/1998-no-longer-the-hottest-year-on-record-in-usa/
What amazes me is that a lot of people actually still believe that there was a Y2K problem and that it was fixed, by worldwide efforts, only problem with this belief is that half the world didn’t bother to check anything and nothing went wrong.
In UK I was paid handsomely for formulating a long list and certifying software and equipment that there was absolutely nothing wrong with.
My colleagues in Italy, in keeping with all their countrymen, checked nothing at all, and nothing went wrong.
Some people suggest that a lot of things were solved without publicity, amazing!, if anybody had solved anything they would have shouted it from the rooftops.
For all those who believe they solved a Y2K problem, show us the software code you altered then I will believe you. A lot of people point to potential errors with or caused by clocks, clocks are not software so not a Y2K problem, and any clock can be set to any date/time you want, and to any time zone. I am even led to believe that for the same instant of time, a clock varies with Longitude, and somewhere at the same time it will be a different day.
Quoted before already by pwl, but so completely recognizable as a statement of Lindzen:
“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.”
You can hear him say it, with his slightly humourous yet very authoritative way of talking.
Lindzen, a great scientist. Thanks for cheering me up with this. I needed it.
I know history revision when I read it and I have read some in the comment section of this page. I have been a fulltime professional programmer since 1988. I worked for a small business made up of Windows and web programmers and DBA’s from 1994 to 2004.
The company was jointly owned by two men. One went completely over the cliff because of Y2K. He bought all of his employees books explaining why it was simply too late to rescue the modern world from the pending Y2K disaster. He nearly bankrupted himself and threatened to sell his half of the business to a virtual stranger at a loss to get out before ‘the end’. The remaining partner had to go deeper in debt to buy out the hapless, panicked soul.
This is not difficult to research. (http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/01/33419) People thought and taught that virtually everything essential would fail and virtually everything being done was merely way too little way too late.
It was NOT just the lines of code that needed to be fixed – which I see people discussing on this page. It was the tens of millions of embedded chips, etc. that would completely fail. We didn’t know where they were and we would not be able to find them in time..
So, yes, I am sure many people worked many hours to rewrite lots of code and I am sure that was of real help when the clock struck midnight. But it was all the buzz that none of that mattered. The whole system was going to collapse anyway. The First World was going to die at midnight 12/31/1999, or shortly thereafter.
Therefore, I am convinced the comparison between Y2K and CAGW holds: Otherwise intelligent people talked themselves into believing an irrational and unfounded fear and then worked feverishly (and profitably) to convince others. (To be fair, I don’t remember any sanctimonious bullying.)
CAGW = Y2K – ExpirationDate
I worked on several y2k issues myself. It was a real issue but I agree with the article.
The entire y2k situation was blown out of proportion. It was not a difficult problem, it was just wide spread. The AGW issue is also not a big deal, but, in the same manner, the problems have been blown out of proportion.
The fascinating thing about Y2K is that, apart from embedded code in various machines etc., most of the problems (and problems there were) lay in IBM and other mainframe architectures that addressed single items of data at the level, for dates, of, usually, two and sometimes four characters (decimal numbers) for the year. This required a great deal of work to correct.
Some of us, working with different architectures in the ’70s, laughed at this and predicted the potential disaster on 1.1.2000 if nothing was done about it.
We knew because we worked on machines that had a totally different architecture at that level and used four 6-bit characters in a “word”; these 24 bits could hold either a year as, say, 1995 (4 characters representing the decimal number, with leading zeros) or a 24 bit number +/- 8,388,608 (or 7). Dates so held were referenced to a base point of 1.1.1900 and held as the number of days after 31.12.1899 the number being translated by supplied sub routine into the date required. It followed that the difference in days between two dates was simple arithmetic and made e.g., interest calculation easy. Provided dates were stored this way no Y2K bug would ensue; I’m pleased to say that’s what I did.
Now I’ve really shown my age!
Upshot is that, for some, Y2K was a huge problem so little or no comparison can be drawn with CAGW other than the MSM hype.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/03/hansens-y2k-whopper/
UK John:
Read the link I’ve provided above. It was a problem for the (then) developed world – so, of course, half the world (probably more) did nothing. But your idea that Italy did nothing is nonsense.
Heh…I actually owe my job to the Y2K bug. My firm trashed its existing mainframe software (which was full of decades-old spaghetti code, but very useful – it did everything except wash your coffee cup in the morning), and purchased a canned system that only produced canned reports but was Y2K-compliant. Then they announced they would in no way modify the canned reports to meet departmental needs. It was the responsibility of each department to put personnel into place to extract data from the system and produce reports that actually were helpful. I had done some light db programming for the department in my “spare time”, and they created my current position and hired me into it. It’s fun to tell other programmers that I have programs that I wrote in 1999 that I still run every day – and they’re not mainframe programs. I do have some 1999 mainframe programs that I still run every day, but that’s a different animal.
I did stay past midnight to see if Y2K triggered any weirdness in our systems. The only thing I observed was a tiny “blip” that came from the ceiling-mounted smoke detector down the hall. It is hard-wired.
A friend of mine bought a motor generator to connect to his house if Y2K turned out to be a disaster. I asked him if he was sure the generator would work and suggested he buy another just in case. I think he got the sarcasm because he returned the generator but then, oddly, bought lot’s of dried food.
re: Y2K as a (well-intentioned) panic if not hoax.
Wasn’t Y2K our first exposure to Richard Clarke?
It is worth reflecting on that 2nd and 3rd world countries with infrastructures running on old, non-maintained mainframes and worse – that didn’t spend a dollar on mitigating Y2K had few, if any problems. It gave a nice boost to high-tech – artificially expanded the bubble by moving purchases forward, made the 2000 bubble bursting a little worse and a little longer than it would have been otherwise (if government had not interfered with the markets). But that’s par for the course. We never learn. Better to have us all agree to tax us all and mitigate an undesired market effect than tinker with the scale. Else we end up where we are today with no confidence in any price or balance sheet (sigh).
I’m sorry, I am a bit disgusted at the Y2K comparison. Y2K was real, and could have caused big problems. The fact not much happened is testament to IT people the world over.
In early 1998 I was working at Royal Bank of Canada and we found through testing that the foreign exchange network (the one connected to other countries which did the actual cash transfer) would begin looking up exchange rates from 1900 come the date change. Well, that’s a bit of a problem isn’t it! So I had to spend 8 months running up and down the west coast from Anchorage to San Diego to ensure the system was ‘fixed’.
AGW is NOT comparative to Y2K. Y2K was a problem that lots of people tested, proved and fixed. The only similarity between the two is the MSM has taken the alarmist story and scared people.
One of the problems of the Y2K variety involved the firmware of external devices attached to PCs. Again, since there was limited memory space, dates were expressed in 2-digit format. That was easy to repair, since the device driver software used by the PC could be used to change the interpretation to 20XX instead of 19XX. There were many problems far more difficult to repair, and as one person commented, most were caused by the lack of vision of many computer programmers in the 1960-1990 era. There is software still being used today that has date-error problems.
Y2K wasn’t really a PC problem. It was a Big Iron problem, left over from the days when memory and storage were expensive and they could save a little bit by using 2-digit years instead of 4. I don’t know anybody who had a Y2K problem with their PC, but their are always exceptions.
The Y2K publicity was necessary because in those days many company directors treated IT as magic, and they needed to be TOLD that resources were required to deal with Y2K in their company. A few tried to ignore the problem: they didn’t realise that the deadline could not be changed! Those few did hit the headlines, with the MSM treating it as if it was happening across the industry.
Where I worked, a British offshoot of a big US company, we completed our Y2K work before the end of 1998; it was a small project, and only some minor code changes were needed, but it needed to be done.
IIRC, didn’t Steve McIntyre find a Y2K problem in some NASA data?
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/06/quantifying-the-hansen-y2k-error/
“January 19th, 2038 is going to be a really bad day for anyone still running software written in the 1980′s and 1990′s.”
Unless it’s been recompiled with a bigger word length.
Lawrence says:
February 24, 2012 at 11:41 am
The work I did prevented problems from happening. The only people ever claiming that disasters were possible were the idiots in the media.
That widespread and sometimes serious problems would have happened had not fixes and work arounds been developed has been demonstrated by many posters here.
Your dismissal of the whole thing as nothing more than a fraud is both wrong and offensive.
The fact that your friends, running tiny little programs on home computers did not have any problems is hardly indicative of what the rest of the world had to deal with.
I suggest that in the future, when you know nothing, you refrain from insulting those who do.
A “mistake” like Y2K?
In both cases it was an extremely lucrative “mistake” for those who made it. Oops.
But I would put the AGW “mistake” in the same category as the Iraqi WMD “mistake.”
In all three cases, vast sums of money have been extorted using fear and exaggeration and, in the case of AGW and iraq, outright lies.
As for the swine flu analogy, like the Y2K story I don’t know enough of the details to comment too seriously. But the WHO and their Big Pharma partners certainly did ostensibly justify their existence, did generate some massive vaccine sales, and may have saved some pigs.
UK John says:
February 24, 2012 at 12:12 pm
If you want to call me a liar, please be honest and do it openly.
Your call for people to show the code is disengenuous at best. First off, the work was done 12 to 20 years ago. Secondly, in pretty much all cases, the code is the proprietary property of the company that paid for the work and as such posting it would violate several laws.
Y2K was a potentially real problem in some ancient computer systems.
CAGW is a potentially real problem in some modern computer models.
Both created an industry, which unashamedly milked the general public. In both instances, they were supported by science-challenged politicians.
January 19th, 2038 is going to be a really bad day for anyone still running software written in the 1980′s and 1990′s.
For 32bit machines anyway.
I’m an engineer (computer software and hardware, most of my beans and tortillas from networking) and I took Y2K dead seriously. I made sure I had all my November and December 1999 financial statements handy just in case, and made sure we had a few days of food handy, which we always had anyway.
Yes, it was real, and there were a number of poorly managed big iron programs, many of which were virtually unmaintainable, that could have caused problems. But there was a huge overreaction by a number of fear merchants who should have known better. I remember on guy who was claiming the hundreds of millions of embedded processors with embedded real time clocks were going to go bust, and the wheels of commerce will grind to a halt. Food will rot in fields because stores wouldn’t be able to place orders, cars with embedded processors wouldn’t start.
It was all rot. I tried to tell people that a huge number of embedded processors didn’t actually use the RTC circuits (including a few million I had something to do with) and didn’t even care what time or day or year that it was, and that even if food distribution hiccuped, the folks who won’t get paid unless the food moved would figure out something, and fast.
The parallels are close enough for me, no need to stop. Kudos to the folks whose hard work actually kept some vital services up, but the hysteria was overblown, just like with AGW.