Steve Milloy at JunkScience points out what is above the fold in the NYT today – FUD
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
Here’s his scan of the front page at right:
Readers may recall my post What 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere looks like where I presented a meme to help people understand that 400 PPM is just a number. A lot of interest was expressed on this thread about t-shirts.
You ask, I provide, in a choice of sizes, styles, and colors:
Order yours here on your favorite garment, mug, or bag here:
http://www.cafepress.com/WattsUpWithThat
UPDATE: I get email showing me that one of the haters has come up with a t-shirt design. this is from “Sou” (no real name given).
She seems genuinely happy that in her world view that her children will die. How sick.
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Fud means something very different in Scotland where I live.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fud
Gives a whole new meaning to “FUD Factory”.
Phillip Bratby says:
May 11, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Where can I get some of that heat-trapping gas? I’ll never have to use my boiler ever again.
Answer: In the UK, if you go into any one of the fabulous newly refurbished Morrisons Supermarkets, there’s plenty of free man-made CO2 for the taking. It’s flows beautifully in dry ice format over the salad vegetables to extend and preserve product shelf-life. It works, the incredible variety of lettuce remain crisp and the whole effect looks spectacular. Bag it up and take it home. And it’s all man-made.
Talking of supermarkets, according to their web site, Waitrose boast that “Of the total electricity used in our stores, 97% of it is from renewable sources such as wind, water power, biomass and landfill gas.” Er, how?????. Do they have an exclusively private power cable coming in to each of their 300 stores nationwide – which cleverly eliminates all electricity generated from the UK’s coal, nuclear or gas power stations – especially when the wind isn’t blowing? Wow, this is a technological breakthrough! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy shopping at Waitrose – but I do think their ‘green agenda’ of late may do them a disservice.
Anthony, my suggestion was for you to send a nice tee to Mikey Mann to celebrate the day and that magical u400, but I don’t think I recall him personally thanking you, Josh and Kenji for the calendar. So until he shows he can man up and show some very basic and proper courtesird I have to withhold my suggestion.
cn
AndyG55 said @ur momisugly May 11, 2013 at 10:50 pm
You’d be better off with sheep (at least two; they like company). Goats are primarily browsers (think prize roses and other valuable shrubs) rather than grazers.
PG,
All I have is a whole patch of deep grass, no roses and certainly no valuable shrubs.
guess it comes down as to which is most edible. ! 🙂
Interesting thought…. do lambs eat mint ….yummm !
Oh, and PG..
The reason I chose goat for the comment was this.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/should-you-shoot-or-feed-your-goat-to-stop-the-storms-oh-the-dilemma/
Andy, it depends on how you want your lawn to look. Goats are very picky eaters, so you don’t get anything like the close-clipped lawn a sheep will give you. More like someone dragged your lawn through a hedge backwards. Dunno if lambs eat mint, though they taste very good with mint 🙂
Thanks for the link BTW. I’d not seen it.
Bob Diaz / dbstealey / Jim:
Y2K was essentially (but not entirely) a problem affecting very large “legacy”, often interconnected, software systems utilised by major long-established organisations. There were some problems affecting PCs, embedded chips etc. but they were mostly trivial and easily resolved. And, yes, the media as usual indulged in wild prediction: “planes will fall from the sky” etc. Nonetheless, the basic problem was real and, had it been ignored, would have caused serious problems. Here’s an extract from the introduction to a technical paper** published in September 1997 by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel (the epitome of caution and sober commonsense) and addressed to central banks worldwide:
“Failure to address this issue in a timely manner would cause banking institutions to experience operational problems or even bankruptcy and could cause the disruption of financial markets.”
Fortunately, it was (almost entirely) fixed.
“I survived Y2K – because it was recognised in time and people got on and fixed it” is not, I suggest, a useful comment on CAGW.
** http://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs31.htm
I am one of those people who while working for a large multi-national and a couple of other organisations worked on converting the code (some of it COBOL) so that there were no Y2K problems and the work started well before the year 2000. While working on the issue I was privy to a number of issues that had been identified and solved before the date. Some were simple like elevators going to the ground floor. Others were like the electrical distribution network nodes in the US that all had to be updated otherwise they would have failed or some aircraft software that would have caused flight issues. It what was probably the biggest concerted worldwide effort by many nationalities on many countries working on a single issue. The work was put in and on the day there was still some problems but many were minor. Most of the work was done behind the scenes, not advertised nor the potential problems broadcast. Tests were made and the problems observed then just without any fuss fixed. To belittle this work and the results like some here have does a serious disservice to those that put in the work and puts the scoffers in the same category as the ‘Warmists’ that these same people regularly criticise in these pages (often quite validly) i.e. you simply don’t know what you’re writing about.
James Hein says:
May 12, 2013 at 3:20 am
“I am one of those people”
James, I was as well. The comparison is about the media panic, not about the nature of the problem, which in the case of Y2K was real but minor, and in the case of CO2AGW not clear. (We should give the scientists some more time to come up with useful predictions, and until they’re ready, gag them and keep them away from journalists and prohibit them from writing alarmist books. And fire the ones that demand a wholesale transformation of the world economy, as they are not scientists at all. Thinking of a certain Bavarian there.)
That being said, the Y2K media panic was before 2000, the CO2AGW media panic culminated in 2007, and while young people are still constantly bombarded and indoctrinated with warmism the only effect it has on them is that it solidifies their impression that their ancestors are complete morons.
The current media panic is of course the final cramps of our 42 year old monetary system. Where the nature of the problem is again real but minor.
Chuck Nolan, I think Mann could handle a free t-shirt. Although it wouldn’t be “flashy”, it could be “widely distributed”…
Guys, didn’t we beat the Y2K stories to death a few days back? Yes, potential, yes disaster averted, yes lots of us made good money doing little or nothing for panicked people who don’t understand that most embedded chips usually don’t care even a little bit about the date…
Close, Anthony. I’m looking for timeless, something that will last me as the ice age creeps forward…. A line worthy of George Carlin or Margaret Thatcher — or Dorothy Parker. A t-shirt that slams the AGW crowd not just as a difference of opinion, but one with so much panache they cringe. And a t-shirt design large and clear enough to be understood from across a room.
Something to shoot for.
BTW, CafePress, apparently does Palin’s stuff, too. Here’s my “Pit Bulls for Palin:” “http://www.cafepress.com/terrypond.302760244
…Lady in Red
You’re right, CodeTech (re Y2K) – “Yes, potential, yes disaster averted” And, yes, we did beat it to death a few days back. And that’s precisely why it’s unfortunate that three out of seven of these t-shirts have that inappropriate and unhelpful (except perhaps to CAGW zealots) slogan.
guenier says:
May 12, 2013 at 3:04 am
Bob Diaz / dbstealey / Jim:
Yes, your assessment is correct. Y2K was a problem that affected legacy systems, but was ludicrously overblown by the media.
I worked on the Y2K fixes in the late nineties. All were legacy software applications involving dates with 2 years instead of 4. The applications were widely varied, including credit reference systems, insurance, and Royal Mail track and trace. All (that I worked on) involved software written in COBOL that contained decision points where an appropriate sequence of code executed depending on whether one date was later or earlier than another date.
The problem arose because if a date in the 20th century is compared to one in the 21st century, the software is making a comparison, for example, whether “991231” is less than “000101”. Obviously, to a human reader, the second date is ahead of the first date, but the computer simply sees that the first is a bigger number, and executes the wrong code pathway.
One way of fixing the problem was to insert a date windowing solution, which effectively took years between 00 and 28 as being 2000 and 2028. Simple in theory, it actually involved going through tens of thousands of lines of code, and copying every data field containing a date to a field with space for a 4 digit year, and wrapping in a code snippet that places either a 19 or 20 at the front depending on the previous rule.
Whether there would have been a disaster if this wasn’t done, I’ll leave to the Cassandra’s to argue with the Polyanna’s. All I know is that the problem was a real one.
‘DATA’ (containing a DATE STAMP) passed among systems/nodes simply for supervisory functions DOES NOT qualify as “critical functionality” …
A simple inconvenience for the business types (or an operator) as reading a ‘date’ as 1900 vs 2000 DOES NOT QUALIFY as “critical functionality”.
FIND me a specific instance or case WHERE “critical functionality” would have been a factor due to a malformed DATE representation and you MIGHT have a case.
“Show me the code.”
Thank you.
.
The obvious link between Y2k and AGW is …
[drum roll]
… alGore
Btw, shouldn’t the text be like “I SURVIVED Y2K & 400PPM”?
Um, no.
.
_Jim says:
May 12, 2013 at 6:17 am
“FIND me a specific instance or case WHERE “critical functionality” would have been a factor due to a malformed DATE representation and you MIGHT have a case.”
The computer system used by the Berlin fire guard collapsed on New Years eve, making it impossible to dispatch the firefighters in a coordinated way, and they were advised to patrol the streets and look out for fires themselves. Which is a pretty thankless task in the rather huge area of Berlin, and of course New Years Eve has a high concentration of fires. I think a person died that night in a one family home that burned down to the ground, as the firefighters arrived too late.
Such a call dispatching system probably doesn’t even count as safety critical (in a need-to-certify way), as the firefighters were still able to operate, but the sheer logistics of a megacity simply lead to a breakdown of performance that night.
Over the top scare quote:
“We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the double-black diamond run without having learned to ski first. It will be a bumpy ride.”
http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Experts-CO2-record-illustrates-scary-trend-4508335.php#ixzz2T5PPxgAA
Jim – you ask for a specific instance. Here’s one:
It came to light in 2002. A Health Visitor in Yorkshire noticed a higher than usual number of babies with Downʼs Syndrome in her area. What had happened was that pregnant women who were referred to the National Health Serviceʼs Northern General Hospital in Sheffield as possibly being at risk of having babies with birth defects were initially screened by a routine designed to identify those at highest risk. A major factor was age (women over 35 were at higher risk) so that was a main focus of the screening process. Unfortunately, the PathLAN computer used for the task used a two-digit system. Therefore, if a woman born in 1962 presented in 1999, the computer deducted 62 from 99, getting 37 – over 35, so she was at risk. But, if the same woman presented in 2000, it deducted 62 from 00, getting minus 62 – under 35, so (it concluded) she was not at risk. This affected over 150 women.
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm
Due to a DATE issue?
DirkH, I hate to do this to ya, but, at this point that is pure “hearsay” (i.e., defined as being “The evidence of those who relate, not what they know themselves, but what they have heard from others”.)
.
NOT a “critical functionality” issue, but rather an ADMINISTRATIVE issue; EASILY corrected ‘after the fact’ (rerun the ‘data’ to generate a new ‘report’).
Nota Bene: I don’t want to continue to debate this if it detracts from the intent of the original thread and runts counter to site policy (but, I missed out on the ‘fun’ -apparently- of the previous Y2K thread given CodeTech’s input above)
.
Don Mogstad says:
May 11, 2013 at 5:10 pm
Its not the 400PPM of CO2 that I am afraid of…. I am terrified that the remainder of the atmospheric gases have now dropped down below 999,600 PPM.
I predict that when all the other gases, combined, drop to less that 999,580 PPM all sorts of terrible things will begin to be predicted to happen in the near future; and that unless/until we all pool our collective resources to stop it, the non CO2 portion of the atmospheric gasses will drop to 999,560 ppm.
————————————————————–
Scary thought! “near future”?
For clarification purposes, how is the near future defined?
Would you say 150 years should just about cover near future?
I for a wait and see approach.
cn
The garments for sale page works fine for me with Palemoon v20 (Firefox clone), BUT if I disable Javascript I just get a blank page.
Vince Causey: there were several problems with date windowing. To take your example, a system reconfigured in this way wouldnʼt recognise 1900 to 1928 (affecting, for example, a bank’s older customers), would have problems interfacing with systems that were differently configured and, above all, would start to fail as 2028 approached if it were not updated. Windowing caused problems for example in the run up to 2010 – the so-called Y2.01K problem. Probably the most important failures were in Germany, where about 30 million bankcards had problems, and in Belgium, where Citibankʼs “digipass” customer identification chips stopped working. The German failure was reported** to have cost €300m ($420m). Thatʼs hugely significant: it puts into perspective claims that money spent on Y2K remediation was wasted. That one relatively minor failure could cost so much to fix after it had failed, emphasises the massive advantage of spending comparatively modest sums to avoid the possibility of countless such failures.
** http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/06/2010-bug-millions-germans