N2264J

I suppose anything is possible in Libertarian world but that's not the case and it is
not just my opinion.

Y2K: Much Ado About Nothing? - Video - The New York Times

Government works if you take care to staff it with competent motivated
professionals who don't despise government.

.

FDXLAG

Like the IRS.

Adlerdriver

The hubris required for anyone to actually believe the human race can control the global climate for good or bad is astounding.

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis - Forbes

GW 101 « Roy Spencer, PhD

rickair7777

The company I worked for at the time would have lost volume sales, inventory, shipping, and all financial systems plus the company-wide mainframe would have stopped, hampering most other areas of operation if software fixes had not been made. The software fixes were minor, but could not have been done in-house. It took about 18 months to get all the vendors to provide and install the simple fixes. Y2K passed smoothly, but only because the fixes were actually made. I'm pretty sure the company would have gone out of business if we had not made the fixes in advance...we wouldn't have survived waiting months for various IT vendors to develop and install fixes.

Y2K was a non-event, but only because all the important stuff got fixed. The fix was usually simple (if not always easy) in the grand scheme of things, but it still had to be done before the 31 Jan. Actually in some cases it had to be done well in advance where computers were looking ahead (advance scheduling, etc) into the new year.

FDXLAG

Well duh. And if there is a major virus out there all of the above would also happen and your company would likely need outside help to prevent or fix. Was y2K a serious matter yes, did it take epic government intervention to stop jet turbines from spinning backwards, I don't think so.

N2264J

And here's a paragraph from the survey about the sample field apparently written without a hint of irony:

Like the author of the Forbes article, Roy Spencer is a paid hack of the big oil/gas/coal funded think tank - the Heartland Institute, who doesn't believe in evolution either.

ExxonSecrets Factsheet: Roy W. Spencer

undflyboy06

I never bought into the whole Global Warming fiasco. The total composition of the atmosphere is comprised of 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen, .93% Argon, and .036% CO2

I guess all of the Global Warning nuts will use this .036% of the total atmosphere to their advantage to promote their end of the world 2012 scenarios.

There is a thing called natural climate cycle. Did humans cause the ice age.......I think not.

Winged Wheeler

Aren't you the one with the peer review fetish? I could go on one of the climategate threads and find a quote of yours saying "if it isn't peer reviewed then it is just opinion". Not worth the trouble.

Since it is logically impossible to prove a counterfactual unless you replicate the original condition and run a test, one can't say what would have happened had there been less/no work done on Y2K. You and the NYT think it would have been a disaster. I think there would have been some problems, but it wouldn't have been a disaster.

You are entitled to your opinion, as are others.

WW

rickair7777

I don't recall any "epic government intervention", other than the government made sure their own systems were fixed. In the private world we solved Y2K by working with software/hardware vendors.

Point being, while Y2K was a non-event there was a lot of work and scrambling behind the scenes in 1998/1999 to make it a non-event. Y2K "hype" would have been justified if everybody had ignored the problem.

No virus could affect as many systems, all at the same time, as Y2K had the potential to. That's a ludicrous analogy.

rickair7777

You can factually state that some systems would have failed, and you can factually determine which ones...it's just computer programming.

What would the ramifications have been? That's what's debatable...I think more than a "few problems" because some key industries would have been out of action for at least days, likely weeks, or even months. The fallout from that would likely have been global economic problems...remember what happened when the airlines and financial markets stopped for a few days in 2001?

There are only so many programmers in the world, and if every major system had to be fixed, it would take more than a few days...in fact it took about two years, and you can take it from someone involved that there were a lot of long days and weekends involved. I'm convinced it was a good thing that we did all that work BEFORE 1 Jan 2000.

Now with all that said, I'm a big global warming skeptic...too many variables in the science and far too much incentive for climate scientists to "self-serve" by spinning data to manufacture a crisis which provides massive employment opportunities for, you guessed it, climate scientists.

There may be man-caused effects on climate, but what's the magnitude, what are the effects (if any) of natural climate cycles, and what happened to the ice age they were talking about when I was in high school?

If we need to shut down the global economy to avert climate disaster, there is going to have to be a high threshold of proof. Just because big corporations are jumping on the climate change bandwagon only means that they are catering to public opinion or the latest political fad. Remember, the hard-core climate change commandos do not want airlines to exist at all for the general public...you can just ride your bicycle.

Also how do we deal with the third-world? They won't stop anything they're doing just because some political elites in the US have a climate change theory. The only way to control industrial climate factors there will be by threat of force.