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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I agree with what many have posted:
The UK Independent asks: “Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake?”
Catastrophic Global Warming is a mistake. There is nothing that we can do to stop that which is not happening.
The “Millennium Bug” or “Y2K” issue was a problem that was minimized by due dillegence and planning.
On the other hand, the media hype on catastrophic global warming, like the media hype on the “Millennium Bug”, is similar.
“REPLY: Funny, and you keep posting trivial snark without having the courage to put your name to it – Anthony”
Why is it that I’d need to be courageous to put my name to my posts, Anthony?
You don’t even realize the irony of your own comments do you?
Have a look at what you’ve posted and allowed to be commented about on a person who believes in his views and actions every bit as passionately as you do.
You are truly and utterly blind.
REPLY: Generally when an individual calls out another, or derides them in some manner, they have the courage to put a name to accusations. Clearly, with a fake name like “exp” you are like Dr. Gleick in his fake identity emails to Heartland.
I should also add, that by our blog policy, a valid email address is required to comment here. Yours appears to be a partial non-functional email address. – Anthony
I think this is a significant event. A year ago I just wouldn’t have believed this could ever appear in the Indi – and nearly all the comments are favorable.
Perhaps Gleikgate has opened some eyes that should never have been closed and the MSM wall is about to crack.
Lawrence, nobody did remediation on pc’s, microwaves, dishwashers. Resources were deployed where risk and liability were highest. We discovered y2k problems in everything from programmable controllers, scada systems, to interfaces between Major systems. Any one of these problems individually would not have been significant, but if nothing was done, at a minimum millions of people would have had their electric bill screwed up for a while – and we know how tolerant of wrong bills the consumer is – to a full power outage that may have lasted some time. This wasn’t conjecture, we used test environments mirroring our production environment that clearly demonstrated the problem.
Yes, lots of people made money. Yes, it was sensationalized by the usual culprits. Who cares, serious problems were averted – And most importantly the corporation paid for it which was passed on to the customer as happens in a market economy, NOT THE TAX PAYER
I thought there was a bit of a dry run for the Y2K problem in that we’re currently in the year 1433AH which means that there was a century issue for Islamic dates roundabout 1980CE. The Japanese systems also have some complex calculating to get elapsed time and converting the Era Year combinations into western dates. I haven’t got a clue how the Chinese cope with their calendar and retirement age.
Retirement dates and years of service.was one of the first things I had to verify as my small contribution to global safety. As I recall the date was OK, but years of service were more problematic. Business and Governments have solved the years of service problems by virtually removing that element from UK pensions, but that’s a whole different story.
I guess in all cases they use look-up tables rather than on the fly calculations.
Lawrence says February 24, 2012 at 11:41 am
“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.”
Lawrence, please understand, this discussion about Y2K is not at the trash level of ‘will our toasters/microwaves/etc still work?’. We are talking about much more complex things. I wonder, do you even know what a mainframe computer really looks like; what the power of it was; and how much of the UK economy was run using it? Whether or not your PC worked through Y2K is immaterial, the BIG problem was the enormous mainframe systems that ran the country.
Al Gored says:
February 24, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Y2K was not a mistake, it was a design decision based on the the costs of computer storage at the time. The people who made those decisions were for the most part retired, if not dead by the time Y2K rolled around.
Iraq was not based on lies. Saddam had both WMDs and WMD programs. Both were found after the war.
“So are they saying that like the Y2K problem, through proper planning, mitigation, and preparation then AGW will be a non issue? I’m not sure I understand the analogy”
I think the analogy part comes into play when you look at the hysterical reaction to Y2K. Working in the industry where Y2K was the core issue, I should point that software programmers fix bugs all the time. That’s their job. Y2K was just another bug that had to be addressed in some cases. Days, weeks or months dealing with that on the list, then onto the next set of issues. This was always business as usual.
But I can observe three prominent groups in the saga:
(1)
The media beat-up. Went completely over the top exaggerating the scale of the issue and focusing on one particular issue, taking it completely out of context.
(2)
A small group of ‘experts’ who focused on Y2K issues. It was to their benefit to do a beat up and scare people as that generated income from any fear they created. The media loved it.
(3)
The vast majority of working programmers (such as myself). We had work to do and just got on with it. Y2K for the products I was responsible for was a real issue of course. And it took a day or two to sort it out before moving onto more important or critical issues. On average a programming team such as mine deals with about 300 issues a year. Y2K was 1 of that 300.
Now, looking at the media group and the ‘expert’ group, I and my associates just shock our heads in wonder.
There were also many imbedded subroutines that used dates in calculations that were not directly related to the date.
Date was a handy index used for many other things, like making log filenames unique etc.
The legacy of the 2 digit date not only stems from the cost of hardware and to stream line code but in the beginning most programming was done on 80 column computer punch cards, and saving 2 characters was important.
The computer I used on board ship in 1970-72 (Univac 1218) had 16k of memory and 4 microsecond cycle time on memory operations. It took us 8 hours to tape sort a 186,000 line item stock status file. Back then programmers took code efficiency seriously due to the physical limitations of the hardware and if you could avoid reading, and calculating with 2 additional characters several million times a day, it added up to to lots of precious computer time.
As computers got faster they did not go back and re-code all those routines, they simply moved them to the new machine with as little modification as possible. Maintenance coding was a major cost of doing business, you did not screw around with code that did what it was intended to do unless you had a good reason to muck with it.
I was on duty at one of Sun MicroSystems data centers that night. It was mostly a non-event for us, but there were a couple of minor glitches. The unix based systems generally had less problems with this than the older big iron mainframes coded in Cobal or other older languages that were in use when punch card decks were often used for input of 80 column data.
Anyone with any experience with computers knows from first hand experience how such an imbedded bug might not show up for a considerable period of time, so not everything would or did show up at the stroke of midnight. Monthly reports and such that were only run occasionally might depend on a date based computation for some decision tree unrelated to the date specifically but simply use it as a reference that made it easy to sort groups with.
In fairness Y2K was also a good excuse to do some seriously needed recoding of very old software and perform other upgrades in hardware and software.
Larry
Dale said on February 24, 2012 at 1:11 pm:
CAGW is also not testable. Everything is proof of CAGW: warm winters, cold winters, storms, droughts, etc. When its few predictions don’t show up (the troposphere hot spot, warming in excess of current levels even in the case of no emissions, etc.), something is always claimed to explain the discrepancy. The worst thing, however, is that proponents of CAGW want to force solutions on people that are wildly expensive and yet are not expected to provide any meaningful solution to the perceived problem:
Lord Monckton:
Very good slides by Lindzen, and good job as usual by Josh.
My Y2K experience was limited: I just had to verify that all vendor software used by my department was certified (by the vendor) as Y2K-compliant. All claimed compliance and none of it broke. To this day, I’m proud of my part in preventing global disaster. 🙂
Any real or imagined crisis is a potential source of humor (e.g. Josh and CAGW). I still remember this Nike commercial:
Lindzen, aside from saying AGW is “science in the service of politics,” and that “warming would reduce rather than increase tropical storms,” says: “Claims… that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”
Piers Corbyn, in a comment, takes it further: “Observational evidence gives the possibility that the net effect of CO2 increases on World temperatures may not be ‘only trivial’ but in fact miniscule, zero, or even negative due to errors in some of the science some claim or – I would suggest – hitherto not understood feed-back and competing processes…”
I say that the effect of CO2 doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Or, to put it another way, I have two main points: there is nothing wrong with the climate (no h stick), and CO2 has nothing, or effectively nothing, to do with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg
Y2K broke down into two areas :
Main frame : very real and a major effort had to be put in place to ensure a bug known about since the banks found it in 1970 was finally removed. Really bad programming practices were allowed to continue up to 1998.
Non Main Frame – PC and other devices lies and media scare mongering coupled with the abysmal knowledge joe public has about how computers work made some scam artists millions.
Example – I had to certify for a well known cable and wireless telco that the stat muxes (statistical multiplexers) were Y2K compliant; because they have ‘clocks’ in them (crystal oscillators ). I could NOT convince the rep that a crystal oscillator does not give a damn about time and date.
Example – a well know Process control system which had a clock display on the operator screen; had to be certified (code taken apart) to prove no date time usage by the code. This despite the no use of date time clocks anywhere else in the system being well documented.- Most industrial systems were immune; demonstrably so; but still had to be certified on a per factory/power station basis; absolute ignorant paranoia driven by media and ‘consultant’ hype.
Example – Small businesses replacing perfectly good pc code/programs because the charlatans did not do the simple roll forward test that was recommended for such businesses; which gave an audit trail of compliance for the original programs – after all having charged over £100 to check 3 pc’s they had to show something for the 2 hours it actually should have taken to do a compliance audit.
So; all you main frame coders – yes you worked hard on what should have been a none problem and averted all sorts of nasties.
I spent 30 dec 1999 to 2 jan 200 being paid stupid amounts of money ‘stood by’ for a problem that we knew did not exist. None of the major dcs (distributed control system) providers had any problems even in countries which had not installed so called Y2K compliant updates. That covers refineries; pharmaceutical; food and manufacturing industry : globally.
The waste of time and money outside the main frame community; and the rip offs and fraud carried out out was disgusting
In no way is the millenium bug science equivalent to the issues with alarmist predictions of catastrophic global warming in terms of the underlying reality.
I can tell you that during testing in 98 and 99 with moving clocks forward on critical business systems we uncovered several dozen issues some of which took a month or more of programming to resolve and others were simply unfixable or uneconomical to fix and we replaced those systems prior to the millenium rollover.
The millenium bug in the end was a non-issue only because so much effort was put into identifying and rectifying non compliant hardware and software, so at its heart was a real and true issue. The only similarity to alarmist warming situation is the media overplay typical with any doomsday prediction being a newsworthy story and a similar lack of understanding of the underlying facts by journalists in general.
“REPLY: Generally when an individual calls out another, or derides them in some manner, they have the courage to put a name to accusations. ”
I’m sorry but in all things you do the most common people who try to defunk you are PR hippies!
The most common person who calls you out, don’t readily print their name, and usually work for Big Green, go figure.
Most of the times, in your context, when people put a name to an accusation . . . it’s not their name they sign to boot.
Usually, the “evil” blogger just delete the idiot’s message and then laugh at him complaining all over. :p
Slightly OT, but I still use an HP9000/310 to control some lab instrumentation. It has run fine since 1986 (!) with just a single change of onboard lithium cell. OS is HP “Rocky Mountain” Basic 4.03, and I wondered whether it would cope with Y2K – Jan 1 came and went, with no problems (and no intervention).
But 2000 was a leap year, and the date & time went “invalid” on Feb 29, and never recovered – now I have to load it manually when I power up. Never heard of any other instances of this Y2K “variant” issue but I guess most folk might have upgraded h/w or s/w a little earlier…
On CAGW, I sincerely wonder how anyone could read Nigel Lawson’s “An Appeal to Reason” and still defend the “mitigation” corner.
The Y2K Bug is a good example of NOT reporting on all the facts and only presenting data to match the fear that TV Stations were promoting.
Both Unix and MACs use a binary number to calculate the date. The number is a count of the number of seconds from a given date. Because it’s not base 10, the year 2000 has no different meaning in binary.
The real problem was ONLY when the computer used a BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) to calculate the date AND they had to use only 2 digits for the year AND the program used the BCD Year to calculate length of time.
The news media suggested that some line of code that needed to be fixed would be “hidden” in millions of lines of code. However, the truth was that most software defines variables at the front of the code. A programmer could quickly find the variable for year and use the FIND Function in the editor to see where it’s used. No need to search through “millions of lines of code”. The News Media knew nothing about programming in the same way they know nothing about telling the truth.
By the way, our alarm clock had a Y2K bug, we can’t set a date beyond 2000. We solved the problem by setting the date to a year 28 years ago. Every 28 years the pattern of day of week to day repeats for every given month. Our clock thinks it’s 1984.
“The millenium bug in the end was a non-issue only because so much effort was put into identifying and rectifying non compliant hardware and software, so at its heart was a real and true issue”
This is where the misrepresentation comes into play. Hard to quantify but maybe for 1% of the software out there in service it was a big issue. For 10% it was a moderate issue and for up to 25% it was a minor issue.
Ultimately, though, so what? Software companies and programming teams deal with critical, moderate and minor issues every day before and after the year 2000. One issue, however — this one — was exaggerated to hysterical proportions. That is why the comparison with CAGW is on the money.
The fact that the issue was grossly exaggerated was self evident by the fact that literally no problems were observed in the days after the new year. If “so much effort” was required to resolve the huge issue that it apparently was, it’s remarkable that it appears nobody messed up. Either there was a near 100% score or some people still want to rewrite what actually happened back then.
And BTW, one of our older packages, nearly a quarter of a century old, died at the start of this year due to a date issue of another sort. Such is life.
Interesting that so many IT professionals are AGW sceptics. Probably because we spend our lives looking for logic errors. And quite a few come from science and engineering backgrounds so have some strings in our bow on that side too.
Sensorman
February 24, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Slightly OT, but I still use an HP9000/310 to control some lab instrumentation. It has run fine since 1986 (!) with just a single change of onboard lithium cell. OS is HP “Rocky Mountain” Basic 4.03, and I wondered whether it would cope with Y2K – Jan 1 came and went, with no problems (and no intervention).
###
Now your talking my language. I happen to be pretty familiar with all of your topics. A buddy of mine just had his system bomb, after over 20 years!
The media beat-up did a lot of damage to the reputation of the IT industry; especially after the 1st of January, 2000. The sensalionalist media and the supporting merchants of woe weren’t hounded.
My Y2k disaster strategy was to keep backups, some paper and pencils. It was implausible that the supply chain for food, etc would be disrupted in a free-market economy; where it’s in the interests of suppliers to ensure continuity of supply. And if one failed to supply, others would take up the slack and profit.
Contrary to what has been expressed by some, the Y2k problem wasn’t just in “legacy” systems or in older software. Throughout the 1990’s I worked for a small company that adapted major application software for the needs of local customers. Throughout most of those years; certainly well into 1998, other “programmers” were still coding Y2k bugs. And they got really, really upset when I pointed out the flaws and offered robust ways in which they could achieve the result that they wanted. They were upset because 1) they had to learn something new; and 2) because they were trying to meet a deadline promised by a marketing mangler. Some had the nerve to argue that their new code had to be “consistent”.
As a result, fresh code with *known* Y2k bugs was still being “shipped” in 1998 and likely well into 1999.
Worth noting also that Unix-like systems were not immune to the Y2K bug … as at least one commenter suggested. The Y2k bug arose out of the need for an external representation for the date; for communicating with users and disparate systems (EDI, etc); systems which had (and still have) legacy formats for dates rooted in the 1970’s and earlier. And although hardware capabilities increased dramatically in the 1980’s, software was locked into backward capability; making the new hardware behave like the old stuff because everybody wanted to stick to “a standard”.
There hasn’t been a substantial shift from that mind-set. Diversity isn’t valued as a strength, one which provides resilience so that at least some systems if there’s a zero-day event in one type of system. The effort to keep everything the same seems to me to far outweigh the efforts necessary to cope with disparate, diverse systems. (Similarities with those seeking a stable climate.)
BTW: One chilling effect of Y2k compliance measures was that the compliance stickers were sometimes placed in a way that compromised the operation of the equipment.
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.
Oh yes, you guys are the good guys!
I’m a bit stunned as to how people can become so disturbingly self-deluded. How perfectly you reflect what you claim are the worst traits of your opponents. Group Think does that.
I know Anthony, You have an answer for that and will not allow the comment. Confirmation.
______________________________-
Is your website as successful?
Not even a price scanner in Kmart failed
The only thing that failed that I know of is Hansen’s code, which spuriously increased warming trends for several years.
But that’s okay. He subsequently readjusted it all (again) — and the increased warming “adjustment” lives.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Pretty much parallels the whole agw scam if you think about it.
Hype up the issue and turn it into a threatening scenario to get the punters to buy into it.
“One time only, do it now, save yourself from the bug”, blah blah flipping blah…
And so to agw, “Do it now, save the planet, millions will die, pay us money to save yourself” blah blah blah.
I don’t like the comparison between Y2K and AGW. I’ve been a systems programmer on IBM z/OS systems (mainframes) since the 80s, and it was a real problem that needed addressing with the number of programs that had a 2 digit date field for the Year.
That companies milked it for all it was worth in tax concessions is another thing.