…is it like the Millennium Bug?
As he says, it’s pseudoscience in the service of politics. Of course, the nice thing about the Millennium Bug was that we knew to the second when it would occur.
16 thoughts on “Catastrophic Global Warming”
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And we knew to the minute, when it DIDN’T happen, so we could say, “…toljaso!
While it did happen at a hospital in my town. One of my daughters fell down the stairs about 11:30 so I saw the year 2000 begin in an emergency room. They had a few problems with the computers which afforded me the opportunity to speak with one of the IT guys on duty. He said that they had worked to make sure there were no software problems due to the year ’00 being before the year ’99. Just to be safe the hospital’s IT management decreed that all software developers and all system administrators would be at work that night. While this was overkill there were enough of the right people there to keep the hospital running well enough that most of their customers and many of their staff did not know there were any problems.
If I wasn’t also in IT for a couple decades before that night I may not have been aware of any problems. I do know that there was a lot of software written that would not have worked if it hadn’t changed it before hand.
Someday I may tell you about my experience arriving in Seattle on a late night flight in the fall of ’99 with my only credit card expiring in ’00.
It’s not too soon to start worrying about Y3K! I have absolutely zero confidence that my current computer won’t crash when the first second of the year 3000 begins!
I think you mean the Y2038 problem.
Interesting, thanks!!
Looks to me like the rise of 64 bit OS’s should handle the problem, though it appears to be a concern now for programs that deal with future dates.
On a serious note, I agree with the analogy, except that for AGW the “cure” is vastly worse than anything proposed for Y2K. AGW is being used as an excuse for draconian taxes and economic hardships.
As for AGW itself, I’m a “lurkwarmist”‘; I believe that all sorts of human activity, especially changes in earth’s albedo due to farming and dust, can impact temperature. My best guess is that there is a climate impact, but at least an order of magnitude less than AGW predicts. So, the 4C rise they fear would end up being between .25 and .4C, worst case.
Is this a major issue? YEs, but not in the same way they seem to think. I do see a .4C increase over what it would otherwise be as having one huge effect: it should be enough to either stop, or greatly slow, the transition to the next glacial period, which we are overdue for. (and they last around 90,000 years).
It would thus, IMHO, be a most delicious irony; the AGW the left fought to stop ends up saving us.
Every once in a while, the irony of the AGW movement overwhelms me. Purporting to be a “Green” movement, they are nevertheless hell bent on eliminating the two things a green planet needs to be green: warm temperatures and plenty of CO2 in the air….
I darkly suspect they’d be happy with a new ice age, because it’s “natural”.
What I can’t figure out is if they’d see the resulting death toll (in the billions due to crop failures) as an acceptable consequence, or as an end unto itself.
To the more radical Greens, human extinction is the objective. Our species is a “cancer” on Gaia, don’t you know?
Absolutely not. In the 1970’s they predicted an Ice Age and had a set of prescriptions to avoid it:
Remarkably the very same set of prescriptions they suggest now.
Whether the problem is war, poverty, racism, or pollution, the left’s solutions always end up reducing individual liberty and giving more power to the government. Less capitalism and more socialism.
Funny how that works out.
When all you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts to look like a nail.
Actually, it’s a horrible analogy, when you get into the details.
Y2K was an overly-hyped, self-defeating prophecy. The “integrated components” were, for the most part, never in any danger, which means that the claims of falling elevators and planes and power grids were absolutely false all along (just like CAGW). However, part of Y2K was exactly right–without mitigation, most major retailers would have been severely hampered at best and very likely would have been unable to operate normally, with everything from cash registers to logistics planning interrupted. A massive effort, costing billions of dollars, was put together not by a governmental body, but by each individual company to make sure that, by golly, *they* weren’t going to be one to fail.
So far, I haven’t really seen any evidence that even such a lesser effort may be required for CAGW, although that may perhaps be because proponents are too busy blowing everything into a disaster to support something that sure looks like communism all over again.
A bit of perspective.
I worked my hindquarters off helping my employer get their computers ready for Y2K.
I sat in a “war room” waiting for action as each timezone hit midnight.
We had prepared.
Nothing happened.
People said it was a hoax.
Bulls**t!
Nothing happened because a whole lot of people spent years getting ready for it.
We knew exactly what could occur, despite the hysteria on the one hand and the catatonia on the other. I was quite familiar with the affected code in our environment, and knew we could have some issues. Nothing major, but enough that we needed to take care of it.
In complete contrast, AGW is based on nothing but hysteria.
Like all well-trained collectivists, AGW alarmists take advantage of the discipline that others must have: very few things in this universe are understood to the level of absolutism. They exploit this rhetorically, when they themselves would utterly fail the same agitprop directed towards them. We admit that there’s some tiny room for error in our understanding of things; they claim that as proof of theirs (an utterly absurd violation of logic).
The vast majority – huge majority, really – of years in the past ten thousand or so have been warmer than any in the last century.
To put a point on it: last time I checked, we’re not living on Venus: our atmosphere and biosphere is fine, thank you very much, no runaway temperatures here.
A working hypothesis should be able, when provided with data, to predict trends forward from any given time in the past.
AGW fails such a test without tweaks to their source code to make the outcome conform (I do remember all of that from Climategate, in addition to the e-mails themselves – I’m glad I wasn’t the programmer of that piece of junk).
These clowns are spending my grandkids’ money on crappy pseudoscience. Solyndra, anyone?
Funny how both AG cooling in the Seventies and AG warming now both require the same measures to resolve: let the Enlightened Class run our lives, control our property, and force us to live in increasing poverty while they fly around in their Gulfstream jets.
The real Enlightenment was a true revolution; among other things, it brought the concept of God-given freedom that human governments could only attempt to seize or destroy.
In true Orwellian fashion, they are now claiming that “real science” is not systematic, skeptical investigation; I wonder who they will identify as their Emmanuel Goldstein?
We have always been at war with Eastasia (or, is it East Anglia?)
Most of their work would have been more at home on a Seventies half-hour syndicated TV show with Leonard Nimoy as the narrator.
He also said that the IPCC needs “positive feedback mechanisms” to justify anything above a one degree C increase in their predictions. But: “Observation points to small negative feedbacks.”
You mean, higher CO2 leads to more plant growth, which moderates CO2?
Someone needs to make sure that guy’s bodyguards are adequately compensated.
The main missing feedback is due to the heat transfer effect of tropical clouds.
The climatologists have freely admitted for years that they don’t completely grok clouds. They included some of the direct ‘static’ effects. That clouds block some light from the ground (a slight negative feedback), and that clouds trap longer wavelength radiation (a strong positive feedback). But without considering mass and energy transport other than the radiation effects.
What they forgot was freshman chemical engineering. (Mostly because they aren’t engineers). The -actual- effect of tropical thunderstorms is to take ground-level heat and moisture and allow it to rise ~80,000 feet. In the form of massive convection cells. The tops of the clouds are ‘past’ a large portion of the obstructing atmosphere and able to radiate heat to space much better than the original warm water on the ground was able to.
It isn’t a matter of infrared radiation piercing the clouds at all – it’s a matter of the entire shindig being an efficient heat exchanger.
The truly killer quotes from the Climategate files revolve around this. The “missing heat” of Trenberth is missing because the energy transport processed of the clouds themselves explicitly wasn’t included. And the second piece – the dawning realization that ‘I wish we had better cloud models.’
CAGW Theory: More CO2 -> slightly more heat -> significantly more clouds -> catastrophic increases in heat as the open-loop unstable situation explodes.
But… more clouds lead to significantly more heat dumping to space.
From Liar Liar:
Fletcher: Your honor, I object!
Judge: Why?
Fletcher: Because it’s devastating to my case!
Judge: Overruled.
Fletcher: Good call!