Global warming fanatics?

Question

did you also panic for Y2K ?

Answer 1

Ummmmm.  No.    But corporate America sure did.

Answer 2

How's that Kool-Aid taste, Bob?

Tell me, did you fall for the Global Cooling (New Ice Age) scare of the 70s?

Answer 3

i don't believe in GW but what does IMAO mean?

Answer 4

Gosh I sure hope you're right, because if you aren't and all those scientists are, you, as knowledgeable as you are, and the rest of the world, are screwed.  I'll stick with the scientists....call me what you want....

Answer 5

You mean people who say global warming isn't real?

Y2K was a very real problem that took thousands of programmers and billions of dollars to solve.  The only problem was that people weren't confident enough they solved it.

But it was a real and serious problem.

So is global warming.  Do you claim that thousands of scientists are ignorant, stupid, or in a giant conspiracy?  Along with most all world leaders.

eric c - Outer Mongolia had no problems either.  Neither country had a lot of systems programmed with COBOL.

gcason - Global cooling was an idea of a few "skeptics" with no good data, much like the "skeptics" of today.  Some of them are the same people, in fact.  Reid Bryson was one who predicted global cooling in the 70s, and is a "skeptic" today.  Wrong then, wrong now.  

And not at all like global warming scientists with a mountain of proof, and backing from EVERY major scientific organization..

Answer 6

No, that date digit problem was fixed before hand on all major systems, and what-not.  Society just likes to get carried away with reality.  

You tell em Bob!  I don't get how some people manage to remain so ignorant.

Answer 7

The Y2k problem was real, caused by programming practices at that time.  In the 1960s for example, a mainframe might have 4k of magnetic "core" memory.  Not a Gigabyte or two like a laptop today, not a few megabytes like PCs in the 1990s, not 64k like the IBM PC I used at IBM San Jose headquarters in 1981.  Four thousand bytes (eight bits each, so it could only represent a number between 1 and 256... not a lot of information).  The whole program had to fit in that memory, and data was brought in for calculations and the results were output to printer, punch card, tape or massive Direct Access Strorage Device disks (which didn't hold much either at that time).

For decades, programmers had to conserve every byte they could, to enable programs to run successfully.  Eventually they still wrote in assembly and machine code to save steps wherever performance was important.  

One of the shortcuts they took was to arrive at a calculation of how many years had passed by subtracting the last two digits of the starting year form the last two digits of the ending year.  Instead of "1980-1972", they could simply use "80-72" and still get the correct answer of 8 years.  They could not only get away with this, it was highly desireable in banks, stock brokerages, insurance firms, and other environments making lots of calculations using lots of dates.  The saving in computer time with this sort of technique was massive, saving billions of dollars, allowing the companies to purchase and maintain fewer computers.  Computers were huge at the time, cost millions of dollars each, and required special air conditioned rooms with raised floors, redundant power, and so on.  Critical calculations were performed on "fail safe" redundant systems, so companies such as banks often had to buy twice as many computers as their calculations actually required, adding to the cost.

It eventually became apparent that these calculations would fail at the end of the century, when a simple subtraction such as "00-72" would yield a negative number.  New programs were written with better technique, but no one could say for sure where those sorts of problems might pop up, embedded deep in a program or even in an operating system in something obscure like a network router or a traffic light.  Computers were used by this point to control trains, air traffic control, stock markets, banks, strategic defense, and other systems that would be inconvenient to have fail.  The worst part was that this type of programming had grown pretty obscure, and it could be pretty difficult to dig up the source code in an out of date system and review millions of linens of code to find a line or two of (what had become) bad programming style.  

Often it made more sense to replace the old system with a new one that was less likely to fail.  I sold literally thousands of UNIX systems in the late 1990s, many to run companies' key systems, often replacing older mainframes.  

It was a very real problem, which was solved because executives didn't deny it, and invested a lot of very real money to make sure it wasn't their company that had its customers' data or its financial records inadvertently scrambled at midnight on 12/31/1999.

As it turned out, because a lot of the companies that made the investment "addressing the Y2k issue" did so by replacing aging systems, they upgraded to open systems and Internet-based technologies, becoming much more competitive in the process.  

It's actually a useful analogy.  Our climate is getting scrambled.  We can prevent disaster if we make adequate investment before a tipping point is reached.  A major difference is that we don't know an exact date.  We do know it could be very soon.  A lot of the conservation and technology fixes for global warming will have positive effects such as significant cost savings, reducing dependence on foreign oil, and prolonging the time when oil will be relatively available and relatively affordable.

Answer 8

Man made Global warming is a myth,otherwise science would have discovered the cures for cancer,aids and the like.The problem with GW is that we dont know everything(even the weather prediction is only good for a few days in advance,and its based on probability).This only leads to hypothetical theory.This means non facts,and since its this way it can only conclude to a guess.Which of course,is not science.Look up(Dr.) Roy Spencer as to why the computer models for GW are inaccurate.

Answer 9

Bob is wrong.  Y2K was a media scare, that government spent billions of dollars fixing.  Meanwhile China did not spend any money, and nothing happened.  So Y2K was a complete waste of money.

Answer 10

No, all that could have happened was a few important computers going down. nothing major.

it took thousands of man hours to fix all the computing software  so that we would not have any major problems.

BTW how can you be so sure global warming is a scam?