The UK Independent asks: "Is catastrophic global warming, like the Millennium Bug, a mistake?"

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