Re: [Paddlewise] Winter in a time of Climate Change

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 9:18 AM, Mike Euritt <sixteenfeet_at_sbcglobal.net>wrote:

>
> I've been suckered in the past with "science supported"
> doom and gloom, most recently Y2K, but remember clearly predictions of dead
> oceans in the 80's accompanied by catastrophic ocean rising, repeated in
> the
> 90's, global cooling of the 60's, Hole in the Ozone. Believe if you like,
> but
> the record of the doomsday prophets being correct is 0. I look at the
> weather
> map and see lots of cold everywhere, much of it erlier than normal and
> colder
> than normal. Which is, of course, absolute proof of GW...
>

Ok... now let's deal with this because I think your thoughts reflect the
thinking of a lot of people.

We'll take Y2K first because ... uh... you mentioned it first I guess. And
also because I happen to be in the ranks of people who work with computers.
Oh, wait. Everyone works with computers. Jeez... I keep forgetting that.

First, a little reminder of what Y2K was all about. Back in the old days of
computers there were a lot of flat-file databases written in a computer
language called COBOL. This was so long ago that the year 2000 was
comfortably far off in the future and, like thousands of high school
teachers who put "19_ _" for the date on mimeographed test papers, computer
programmers, to save memory space, assumed every date would be prefixed by
the number "19". Of course, when the clock struck midnight on December 31st,
1999 this would no longer be true. Thus the year 2001 would be "01" and all
these databases would crash.

As it happens, this assumption was pretty much true. Databases with only two
places in the year field would probably have problems. So there was a huge
scramble to patch them and tons of retired Cobol programmers who had been
told they were useless drags on society were called back to duty to work on
it. The best part was that they got paid well for it and they no longer had
to wear ties. :)

The media who are mostly (as far as I can figure out) art history majors
with a minor in Kwakiutl basket weaving). got wind of this and assumed that
it meant that every computer would crash and the Internet (and thus the
world) would come to an end. Too bad that routers, which make up the
backbone of the Internet, don't much care what the date is. They may be
terribly concerned about the hours and minutes but the year..... not so
much. But Cisco - which runs the Internet - patched them anyway.

Were there computers that had problems with the Y2K bug? Sure... lots of
them. But none you noticed. The ones that mattered got patched up and put
back on line.

Just wait until 2030 when the Unix Y2K bug hits. Then you'll be sorry. :)

Craig Jungers
Moses Lake, WA

PS: Yet another post to cover the ozone hole and climate versus weather and
then, we all hope, stick a fork in me... I'll be done.
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