Kate, I love your style of wit. :)

In one of the most recent New Scientist magazines an article discusses how in the 1970's most climatologists thought the Earth was in a long term cooling trend. The fear then was that we were heading to another Ice Age. Since then things have changed. What is different is that now the discussion is fused with politics and intolerance. What is the same is that science is still figuring out how all of this climate stuff works.

The Earth is heating up. There is no doubt about that. There is plenty of doubt as to the cause and the nature of the heating. (is it long term, will it reverse itself, is it man made, or aggrevated by man?)

Given the affects of either the cooling or heating of the Earth, I choose heating. We can actually survive that disaster. I am not sure how we would all live on top of a 1 mile sheet of ice.

even better, read the feedback comments down in the Canadian blog on the article. for only 5 years left in their lives you would think they might panic before they agree. but they all agree. should contact them about buying them out so they can spend their last few years driving around in RVs to see the remains of the world.

The best thing at this stage, IMHO, is to get an honest debate among respectable scientists going on the subject. Include the sceptics, like Bjorn Borg and some of the group that wrote to SH for just such and approach. Climate change is probably cyclical and beyond anyone's control so let's get the facts on the table. There is already too much hysteria pervading the MSM, as your post shows.

Notice the "happy" coincidence with the prediction of the Mayans for the end of the world in 2012 due to a planetary conjunction. Here is another, this time by an asteroid.

http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/15008.asp

fixing the world through flowers, the left coast should be happy.

http://www.checkbiotech.org/root/index.cfm?fuseaction=news&doc_id=14173&start=1&control=140&page_start=1&page_nr=101&pg=1

"I've got to batten down the hatches in preparation for tonight's forecasted blizzard."

I've got three hi-speed Internet satellite dish installs scheduled for tomorrow in the Alsask/Flaxcombe area. Think I'm gonna spend the day inside snarfing munchies and watching Die Hard 1-3 instead.

Y2Kyoto...

4.5 billion deaths!?!

Holy moly Batman, time to back up the truck on funeral operators stocks!! Death and destruction can be a paying venture.

Hey isn't the aging demographic going that way anyway?

Here in Vancouver at 11 Celsius, they are also calling for snow tonight.

I'm not sure whether I should wear a Speedo or a parka; but I'll be sure to keep my undertakers shovel handy in the next five years.

Are the "chicken little" groups who predicted the cooling trend the same ones who are now on the warming side of the argument?
Give me clean air, reduce polution and let Mother nature do her thing. Hey the woman always gets her way so quit fighting it.
Clean air Clean air and stop tilting at windmills, they produce clean energy

Another good reason to pospone that RRSP contribution! In fact, I wonder if my kids will tap theirs for a last trip to Mexico or the computer store?

"Y2Kyoto". I love it.

From around 600 AD to 1250 AD there is clear evidence that Northern Europe was becoming warmer. Evidence comes from:
18O record from the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Limits of cultivation were higher on hills than they have been in later centuries.
The upper tree line was higher than earlier or later times.
During the 900s, there is evidence of several periods of prolonged drought, particularly from sequences of very narrow tree rings (the tree growth was reduced by lack of water). At the same time, there is evidence suggesting a predominance of "anticyclonic" weather over Northern Europe. This would give a rather "settled" type of weather with warm, dry summers and cold (but still dry) winters. For example, archaeological investigations in York reveal large numbers of bone skates from the Anglo-Scandinavian period.
During the following two centuries, rainfall increased significantly and tree rings are correspondingly wider.
Settlement of Iceland by the Vikings began around 860 AD, although Irish monks had been there already. The earliest explorers and settlers reported sea ice not far to the north of Iceland and some of the northern Icelandic fjords being choked by ice. However, later records make no mention of ice until the late 1190s and only after 1203 was significant ice reported. Grain was grown in Iceland from the time of the first settlement to the late 1500s, when it was abandoned.
In 986, the first Viking settlement of Greenland began. At first the settlement was successful and it was even possible to grow cereals. The settlers lived by rearing sheep and cattle. None of this is possible today. At its peak, the Norse population reached about 4000, with about 300 farms, 12 churches, a cathedral, a monastery. The settlers also traded with the Eskimos further north. After about 1300, the climate began to deteriorate. Stock rearing became unreliable, crops failed and the settlements were cut off from the outside world by sea ice for several years at a time. Unlike the Eskimos, the Norse settlers were unable to adapt to living off the sea (where fish were still plentiful). The last recorded contact was in 1410, although archaeological evidence suggests that one settlement hung on until about 1500. A recorded visited by a ship in 1540 notes only abandoned farms.

.....and it should be pronounced as follows:

Why-Too-Kay-Oh-Toe

LOL!

You have started a new 'movement', Rob. Can't you hear Rick Mercer "We are Canadian, we are y 2 coy yo de doole doos"

MY FREIND SAYS THIS IS A UNIX PHONE. ITS COOL, ID LIKE TO FHAVE ONE BUT HE SAYS THERE NO GOOD BECUASE THE APPLE FACTORY IS UNFFAIR TO WORKERS AND THEY ARE WORSE FOR GLOBAL WARMING BECUASE OF SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE PLASTIC THEY USE TO MAKE IT SO LITTLE

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

The new Kyoto neo reality - Way2late4us.

Apparently, we are reaching, soon, a tipping point where "we" can't reverse global warming (unvalidated, of course). Please, for sake of this (unvalidated) fear, we in the West must do our part, and transfer our pollution to the developing world. ASAP!

What a remarkable species we are; able to catastrophically affect our planet's climate with only about 100 years of hard-core industrialization.

What will the Chinese, Indians et al, achieve over the next 50 years? Oh yeah, I forgot, Jack Lyton told me the Chinese "get it."

I recommend we change the lexicon from "CO2 emissions" to "tailpipe emissions." which will achieve real environental benefits, along with reducing CO2 too!

I know, good luck with that one.

Well it would solve the islamo-fascist problem. Perhaps its time to make like Dr. Strangelove...

Y2Kyoto .. good one !!

Al Gore just walked into 'The Nature of Things' studio with a piece of sky in his hand.

Or how about 'Y2K computer clitch causes a piece of the sky to fall into a crop circle of franken food wheat.

Peter Foster(Financial Post) and Lorrie Goldstein(SUN) have just written a couple of very, very good articles on the folly of Kyoto.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=24a89c30-8eb4-4cce-a43b-697b76eada51

http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Goldstein_Lorrie/2007/01/07/3215622.html

~~Peter & Lorrie~~ VS ~~David & AL~~

in a Don Cherry type, no-holds-barred slug-fest, would result in mucho enviro-terrorist blood on the dressing room floor. It can't come too soon.

[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]

General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogameous sexuaal relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexuaal characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Shamrock, Co2 emmisions only constitute less than 3 % of greenhouse gas over 95 % is H2o do you really think that the the difference from before the industrial revolution of almost 2% to the 3% of today is really enough to change the whole worlds climate. The planet has been hotter than this and colder than this and it will be again. Although I do think we should pollute less because it is the right thing to do, just not draconian measures like kyoto but reasonable efforts for the enviroment couldn't hurt.

Has everyone seen the article in the Toronto Star under the heading "Baird giving the green light." The picture of our Prime Minister looking like the devil. I am just outraged !!!. Cannot get it to print out nor submit a conplaint to them. Please comment.

wer'e all gonna die, that should be the daily headline for the msm. This latest scam global warming has become our new god, yes all we have to do is name our dogs kyoto and cuss a conservative who, by the way is feeding us , and the environment will cool. maybe cool enough to bring on another ice age, oh my then we will have to rename our dogs and quickly find a new god, call him global assfrezzin. these fu....g lieberals are so desperate to steal your money they will soon be robbing us the old way with a dreaded gun.

Does this mean there will be no one left to die of aids in 2012. Imagine, a cure for aids.

Stephane Dion walks in his door after a long day at the forum battling his arch rival Harper and his gang of environmental miscreants.

Muttering under his breath;something about how that crowd won't take his Kyotomojo seriously,he misses the obvious and steps right into a big dog dooey on his hallway mat.

Well while hopping about on one foot and looking for the paper towels he has the unfortunate luck of landing right on a second dooey just inside the kitchen door.

Feet firmly planted in the mess and spying his dog Kyoto shying under the table he plants both hands on his hips and says in stern voice to the offending pooch,

"Why two Kyoto?"

...corny but fun....thanx for the laugh Kate!

Dion stated his plan calls for the collection and storage of co2 and eventual trading it. First, how is he going to collect it and what is he going to store it in. I recommend the cbc bldg in toronto be used for storage. Many cities have blue boxes for garbage. Will we all have co2 containers in our back yard, to be collected by union idiots who go on strike. And, how many liberal crooks will be involved in bldg the containers. Remember those huge grain storage facilities in the US, where certain "farmers" were paid huge amts, and eventually someone looked in them they were and had always been empty.

According to the WHO, cow flatulence is a three (3) times greater threat to the environment than our SUV's.
I wonder how those mini Ice Ages in the 1400's and 1700's came about with over 40 million Bison roaming the NA plains?

Shirley: You can contact the author at The Sun at the address, pgorrie@thestar.ca

The picture was deliberatly staged that way so the protester would show in the photo. Baird should have been advised that such a setup could occur!

do you ever wonder, when Dion says he believes in the "Science of global warming" just what science he believes in ??

Does he believe the current change in climate is 100% due to human activity ??

We should compile of list of questions for some aspiring journalist ???

Wait. 4.5 billion deaths? The planet, at the moment, has only 6 billion people. Hmm. That will certainly solve the overpopulation crisis.

Why is it that human beings are so addicted to apocalyptic scenarios? Why?

Dion, the new Liberal leader, is an apocaplytic type. Full of threats of The End of Canada. He's just announced that "unless the people replace Harper with a Liberal government, Canada will miss an industrial revolution". So there.

What industrial revolution? And why the threat? Why the End of Canada unless 'we put in a Liberal gov't.???

Oh, and what about "Canada will be a winner when the government reconciles people and the planet". Ahhh. That's the magic formula to prevent the apocalypse. Reconcile the people and the planet. We have been bad; we have overlooked Mother Gaia Nature and we must 'reconcile'. Or else. The apocalpyse. And no industrial revolution either.

My favourite global warming headline came just two weeks ago and was widely reported:

"Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island"

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

The column gets better as you go down:

"Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true."

If you google elsewhere you discover the island went under 22 years ago (about the same time scientists were predicting a global freeze) - but no matter....global warming is now the cause.

See:
http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=207343

Oh, and according to Wikipedia, the rising sea levels are coming at about 3 mm/yr. So the island goes under due to a rise of 30 cm (1 foot) in the last 100 years.

If you believe all this, I have some swamp land in Florida for sale.

Idiots is right. I wish these people would just move on already.

Nothing but a bunch of fear mongers,but many people really fall for it. I got into it with my sisterinlaw over the holidays, she had seen the Al Gore piece and said we only have 10 years left till the end. She realy believed it. Hope she don't read this one. EC can't predict the weather much more than 3-5 days at best. All the climate change fans think they can predict 5-10-15 years in advance? They just want control. As radio host Peter Weissback used to say: They are watermelons,green on the outside and RED inside.

Well, I'm working on a plan to beat this thing. I just picked up a CO2 cylinder and I'm starting to practise - RIGHT NOW - how to breath this stuff. They say any species can adapt so I thou uh, thought um .. somethin bout a head start.. hee hee start - fart - methane... Oh Oh.............

A friend of mine wasa 10 year old in school at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in the '60s.

The teacher started going on about the terrible danger to mankind, etc. So he left the classroom and walked home.

His mother asked him what he was doing home at 10 in the morning. He replied, "Our teacher said we are all gonna die and' I i wanna die at home".

There's a Y2Kyoto lesson here for all of us.

y2k never happened because of the investment to head it off. period. check the personnel ads in 1998 1999 offering a one-time spike in rate of pay.

it never happened because enough people in the right place realized new years eve 2000 wasnt going to be delayed by any means whatsoever.

there were glitches to be sure, I was running windows 3.1 and bumped the date past jan 1 2000 as an experiment; date display was real goofy (I used to show people how to use debug.exe to goof around with file attributes incl. creation date, the reason was DOS just added the 10s and units digit of the year to 1900, when that number became 100 ie 1900+100, the operating system didnt know what to display; it was fixed in windows 95)

y2k NEVER HAPPENED because we prepared for it in response to the publicity and warnings; some of which were unwarranted and exaggerated.

seems those are the one you cons are focussing on to scoff and justify ignoring what could be nothing OR the thing that kills billions.

The world's great quantities of ice, glaciers, etc, have been melting and receding for the last 10 000 years. I learned that in grade 3. It stands to reason that earth's average temperature has increased in the last 10 000 years as well. Do the alarmists think this is a recent occurance?

I remember the hype in the Media about planes falling out of the sky. Did rb debug them too ??

Some auto models would go brain dead at midnight. rb fix that too ??

Third world and some 2nd could not afford programers. rb went over there for free ??

Media hype about some missles auto-launching. rb put a cork in them ??

Fact is the MSM and the Calamity-Janes and Does hyped the Y2K so-called millenium bug out of all proportion. Same with so-called man-made-global-warming, er change doomsayers.

Is it not a crime to yell "FIRE" in a movie theatre ??

robertbollocks:

Y2K problems were clearly 100% man-made and 100% fixable by human effort.

They were also greatly overstated by the MSM and many in the IT sector - both groups that stood to prosper from the hysteria generated.

Global warming - real phenomenon or not - is definitely not 100% man-made nor are there clear man-made solutions to it if it does exist.

If it was as simple and defineable as employing debug.exe we all would have done it.

If it would have required you to write 3000 lines of faultless code for each and every PC to prevent a y2k fault I bet we all would have crossed our fingers and if it failed to boot after y2k we would have gone out and bought new software. There are limits to how much you will spend in time and money to avoid a "Maybe"

Alas, the is no sure-fire preventative "debug.exe" for Global warming if it even is happening and if it is significantly man-made.

Yet like Y2K the MSM and many others are overstating the case and they clearly have a vested interest in creating a hysteria about the issue.

...

Like crying "wolf" if you do it too often when there isn't one people will ignore you when there really is a wolf.

Predicting 4.5 BB fatalities in 5 years time is "Wolf" for about the second or third time to a lot of people.

The tipping point for a broad backlash against the those predicting global warming disaster may be closer than it seems.

Robert is correct when he notes that there were serious problems in 1990's software regarding date representation after 1999-12-31. Many of us (and I use that term personally in this case) worked to make sure that bad things didn't happen because of that problem.

The hoaxes surrounding the two-digit year problem arose out of the way the situation was manipulated to distort reality, in particular by fear-mongers and doom-sayers, solely for personal advancement, without contributing to the solution of the problem per se.

That phenomenon is similar to the hysteria currently attending the climate change problem. Climate changes, more or less, and we solve the problems caused by those changes, for example: via better science and engineering, by adapting (say, crops) or moving, and by famines, pestilence, and war.

The problem with the climate change in our society is not that there aren't lots of good people working on making things better (hi, me again), rather it is that the situation is being manipulated to distort reality, in particular by fear-mongers and doom-sayers, solely for personal advancement, without contributing to the solution of the problem per se.

While I can't answer ET's (rhetorical) question as to why [some] human beings are so addicted to apocalyptic scenarios, I suspect it's something we'll learn more about as brain science advances. It's probably related to a higher than normal fear response in the limbic system, and more pessimistic structures in the fore-brain.

We have to learn to apply the precautionary principle to the precautionary principle itself.

Meanwhile, the fear-mongers and doom-sayers will continue to profit off of the apocalypticists, just as they always have. And as usual, the media and the state will be in the thick of the misbehaviour. By the way, do apocalypticists listen to apocalypso music?

Y2K would be a huge problem for the world, so $300 Billion was spent. What was gained ?

From Wikipedia;

Supporting view;
This view holds that the vast majority of problems had been fixed correctly, and the money was well spent. Those who hold this view claim that the lack of problems at the date change reflect the completeness of the project, and that many computer applications would not have continued to function into the 21st century without correction or remediation.

This view was adopted by most of the (fairly limited) official examinations of Y2K projects undertaken after their completion[14].

It has also been suggested that on September 11, 2001, the New York infrastructure (including subways, phone service, and financial transactions) were able to continue operation because of the redundant networks established in the event of Y2K bug impact[15] and the contingency plans devised by companies[16]. The terrorist attacks and the following prolonged blackout to lower Manhattan had minimal effect on global banking systems[citation needed]. Backup systems were activated at various locations around the region, many of which had been established to deal with a possible complete failure of networks in the financial district on December 31, 1999 [17]. Had the emphasis on creating backup systems to deal with Y2K not occurred, much greater disruption to the economy could have occurred[citation needed]. Decentralization of infrastructure—in particular, the creation of multiple sites for backup data—helped keep banks up and running [citation needed]. In addition, control centers across the nation used their Y2K plans to ground every plane that was currently in the sky. The plans for such an event had been made before Y2K, should all flights need to be grounded at once. Thus, these plans came in handy when control towers needed to bring these flights down on 9/11.

Opposing view;
Others have claimed that there were no, or very few, critical problems to begin with, and that correcting the few minor mistakes as they occurred (the 'fix on failure' approach) would have been the most efficient and cost effective way to solve the problem. This view was bolstered by a number of observations.

The lack of Y2K-related problems in schools, many of which undertook little or no remediation effort. By September 1, 1999 only 28 per cent of US schools had achieved compliance for mission critical systems, and a government report predicted that "Y2K failures could very well plague the computers used by schools to manage payrolls, student records, online curricula, and building safety systems". [18]
The lack of Y2K-related problems in an estimated 1.5 million small businesses that undertook no remediation effort. On 3 January 2000 the Small Business Administration received an estimated 40 calls from businesses with computer problems, similar to the average. None of the problems were critical [19]
The lack of Y2K-related problems in countries such as Italy, which undertook a far more limited remediation effort than the United States. In an October 22, 1999, report, a US Senate Committee expressed concern about safe travel outside of the United States. The report stated that overseas public transit systems were considered vulnerable because many did not have an aggressive response plan in place for any problems. Internationally, the report singled out Italy, China and Russia as poorly prepared. The Australian government evacuated all but three embassy staff from Russia [20]. None of these countries experienced any Y2K problems regarded as worth reporting [21].
The absence of Y2K-related problems occurring before January 1, 2000, even though the 2000 financial year commenced in 1999 in many jurisdictions, and a wide range of forward-looking calculations involved dates in 2000 and later years. Estimates undertaken in the leadup to 2000 suggested that around 25% of all problems should have occurred before 2000.[22]Critics of large scale remediation argued, during 1999, that the absence of significant problems, even in systems that had not been rendered compliant, suggested that the scale of the problem had been overestimated.

$300 Billion, eh ?? Never mind, small potatoes. Kyoto will cost $$ TRILLIONS $$

Ya see, little ole' Stephane Dion, as Enviro Minister, was preparing little ole' Canada to throw a cool $10 Billion at the Kyoto can. For starters.

Anyone in need of a really good laugh , just go to the " exopolitics " section of THE CANADIAN 's webpage . WARNING : not for the moonbat intolerant . Talk about fever swamps , take a look around the entire site ...... YIKES!

I wasn't quite sure what a moombat was. Now I know after reading "exopolitics".

Moonbat

I agree with most of both the supporting and the opposing views from your Wikipedia summary, BHA, in the sense that in my opinion there's at least some degree of truth to most of them. My points are that the two-digit year problem was not a hoax per se, and that the fact that the climate is always changing is not a hoax per se either.

Even though we know that climate change is true -- it always has been so why should it stop now -- we don't know if global warming is true: we may find, for example, that combinations of solar output and cosmic ray flux density as our solar system moves through our area of the galaxy result in an overwhelming forcing function that produces a net atmospheric thermal activity decrease over the next several decades. We shall see.

The bigger problem we keep having to deal with, though, is not the actual underlying problem, as at were, at least as long as we're working on the underlying problem, the bigger problem is that we have people who have a problem with working on the underlying problem, either through lack of understanding, despair, or malfeasance.

In the case of climate change, for example, we have people who do not want to expend resources on optimizing our per-capita-acre energy rate consumption because, instead, they want to make a profit off of transferring their citizens' funds around between their global statist and corpratist cronies, which will do nothing to limit the global integral of the rate of net consumption over time. And, sadly, we have politico-scientific organizations who do not want their perspective to be mitigated, because of the negative impact it would have on their funding profile.

Meanwhile, good people continue to work on whatever problems rise to the top of the queue. Remember, whenever you solve your biggest problem, your second biggest problem becomes your biggest problem. To a pessimist that is dispiriting. To an optimist it is invigorating.

"You can't have everything. Where would you keep it?" --Steven Wright

BHA, others,

I don't know how many of you were coding computers 30+ years ago. I was. At that time disk space cost about $1000 a meg, there was no such thing as virtual memory - you used real memory and swapped or overlayed ... a typical mainframe had 4 to 16 meg of memory. CPUs were extremely slow and expensive by todays standards ... in short, everything was a scarce and expensive resource.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, at that time would even consider sticking a 19 in front of the date. To make things worse we used just about every trick to optimize speed and reduce resources used ... which made the code just about unreadable ... I know that I have forgotten most of the techniques.

I also know that in the late 90's organizations were still buying PDP-11s because they need to get more reliable hardware but they had no trail on the software (documentation got lost years before).

On October 19, 1987 we had Black Monday - the most popular explanation for the crash was selling by program traders ... a cascading effect. I don't recall anyone that I was talking too (in major companies) worried about about a single application (they were checked though) ... the main concern was applications, their own and partners, shutting down other applications ... cascading ... money was spent to bullet proof their business critical systems.

BTW: I didn't make a dime on Y2K and I think the media went overboard.

I agree, Ural. Remember the "steal a bit to indicate century" trick.

Indeed, between 00:00 GMT and 00:00 MST on the 31st, and a few hours later, I ran all kinds of tests to see whether or not we had missed anything. So as you might expect, I was at the US Naval Observatory atomic time web page waiting for 00:00:00 GMT so I could then test access to our various servers. I reloaded that page at about three seconds after -- you can see the result here: tinyurl.com/yd3jnp

Yes, I personally screen-snapped that image on 19100-01-01 at 00:00:03 GMT.

If I'd seen 19100-01-01 at 00:00:03 GMT come up, I think it might have reduced my confidence level on the success of the Y2K efforts somewhat.

Ural, 30 years ago I had already been programming for 7 years (I guess that really dates me), and back then I was thinking of date representation. 2000 is of significance only to COBOL programmers since they seem to have been the only people that would waste a byte to store only 100 distinct years. Those of us who programmed in assembly language or FORTRAN knew that we had at least 155 years to get our act together even if we set year 0=1900.

RT11 (my favorite operating system until I discovered the Mac) has a major problem with Y2K, but that is because the DEC decided that 5 bits was enough for the year field and year 0 was set at 1972. I've run RT11 on E11 (my real PDP-11's are in storage) to see what happens and it doesn't seem to notice when 2000 rolls around and just assumes it's 1999. There are a lot of embedded PDP-11's still working away and I presume they would have just kept on working oblivious to Y2K. The process control software I used to write didn't care what year it was as shoehorning a program into 4Kb of RAM made things like knowing the year rather superfluous.

I still have all of my code from 30+ years ago and it is fun to try to figure it out every now and again. There might be a comment or two in a program, but mostly it was a mass of spaghetti code (structured code hadn't been invented yet) and occasionally I would use long variable names like 'A1'.

The original Mac represented time as a count of seconds since ?1910 in an unsigned 32 bit number which means that in 2046 I might start having some problems with my Mac+. Since the world is ending in 2012, I guess I don't have to worry about this.

Any real programmer pre-2000 dealing with dates took year representation problems into account and someone who would waste a byte to store a packed decimal representation of a 2 digit year didn't deserve to be called a programmer back then. Y2K was fun though as it gave me a great excuse to tell my girlfriend that the world is going to end so I need to buy lots of guns and ammo just in case. Unfortunately she didn't go along with my buying a generator, but I still have the guns.

Y2K was an ecomonic problem that the programmers of logic solved. Kyoto is merely a dream of the people who cannot yet think.

Y2K was an economic problem that the programmers of logic solved. Kyoto is merely a dream of the people who cannot yet think.

Gee whiz Kate you seem to have collected a bit of an old hackers club here at SDA. I wrote my first program 36 years ago.

Anyway, Ural, fortunately the USNO's ntp did not fail, the bug shown at tinyurl.com/yd3jnp was only in the web page's display code (the classic catenate 19 instead of adding 1900 problem that some Perl programmers got wrong - it certainly wasn't just COBOL Loki).

And don't forget, the 32 bit Unix time rolls over in 2038, although I'm already running a 64 bit CPU, so I don't know yet how important that will be.

By the way, some good examples of the kind of problems we run into having to deal with "activists" while making the world a better place can be found in some of the articles at Chemical & Engineering News - pubs.acs.org/cen/index.html

re CO2 Oilsand development is a huge producer. The same tech that is used to force oil up from existing wells , using vast amounts of water, replaces CO2 for water. CO2 stored thousands of feet underground in a contained controlled system. The wells and pipelines exist now. Farmers that have pump jacks in their fields would have instead a CO2 pipeline pushing that downhole vs water. I believe the term is CO2 regeneration.

Check that.. S/b CO2 sequestration

GOOD READ: Goldstein has a good article in todays toronto sun Re: Kyoto Cost $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

And Al Gore invented the internet,HA!HA!HA!HA!

Suzuki should go back to his fruit flies.

Spend money on Carbon Credit rip off, not!

Uncle Mo and his merry band of thieves should be jailed. Oil for Food anybody?

Reducing energy consumption, developing cleaner fuel technologies and reducing pollution in our own back yards, priceless.

The kyoto doomsday/eco-armageddon fear mongering has collectively been dubbed "climate porn" by some conservative media....I agree that this assesment is relatively correct.

Although there is no denying the climate changes and that there are cycles and we are in a warming cycle now, science is deeply fragmented on the causes....even the small portion of climatologists ( a new science which is highly speculative and theory prone ....like being a weatherman predicting future weather models) there is much disagreement.

The latest climate theory I heard was that vulcanism plus the heavy particulate pollution of industrial west in the last century caused a prolonged cold spell because the particulate pollution reflected heat from the sun causung longer colder winters....now that particulate pollution has been greatly reduced by the industrial clean air practices of the last 45 years, the atmosphere allows more IR wavelengths through to heat the earth causing a warming trend...this paper was just published last year and presented for peer review...as usual the scinetific jury is still hung on it so far....again the scientific community fragmented on agreement.

In all this scientific controversy what really irritates me is everytime I turn on a Canadian MSM channel looking for a weather forcast somehow the talking weather head finds opportunity to remind me that every unexpected change in the weather is because of "global warming"....as if the weather geeks are using this mass hysteria as a convenient excuse for them to hide behind when their forcasts prove inaccurate....wrong forcast?.."oh well, that's global warming for ya!"

Listening to CBC we get this phenomina expounded and we are lead to beieve through casual innuendo at every possible opportunity that man made global warming is no longer theory but fact and that this is the number one concern of Canadian voters...this is of course BS...I'm a pretty average Canadian voter and I'm concerned with things far more immediate and concrete than theories about weather forcasting. In one 12 haout stint between CBC radio, RCI and newsworld I counter 27 references to "global warming"...this is rediculous and certainlt reveals an agenda.

The point here is that the apocolyptic global warming scare is just that...a scare and when in the hands of politicians and MSM its a weapon to manipulate the public...mostly with fear mongering and doomsday scenarios.

The reality is that recent warming trends are not radical and there is no telling what is causing them or even that we could do(if anything)to effect it if we did know the cause....one thing is certain....if the globe is becoming warmer the first place to look for answers is the solar system's main furnace....not becoming hysterical over inert naturally occuring gases and transferring huge chunks of wealth to communist nations in a guilt tax placebo.

I believe we should charge a Y2Kyoto import tax on all goods and services coming from non-compliant countries such as China and India.

We can then use the money to buy Y2Kyoto credits and plant trees where all the Walmarts and dollar stores used to be before their prices skyrocketed.

Last summer I think I might have overdone the one tonne challange by a tonne or two and now we're all freezing our asses off.

I feel so used..

I peg the chances of some pathogen becoming both lethal AND easily transmitted wiping out said billions more likely in the near future than climate change doing it.

whose gonna bury the bodies?

one solution I suggested to colleagues to provide time for permanent solution was to use hexadecimal representation for years starting in 2000.

inspired by my knowledge of how MSDOS store the year portion of a date, adding the tens and units of the date to 1900. why not use Ah (the hexadecimal digit after 9) as the unit?
n.b. decimal sequence is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
hexadecimal, ie base 16 sequence is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F

thus, year 2000 would be stored in DOS as 9A, one more year after 99.

ie add 1900 + 90 + Ah(=10 in decimal) yields 2000 for the year.

or some variation in all those records and software that used 2 digits for the year.

it didnt fly, but then again the permanent fixes were coming in thick and fast so the 'big' y2k didnt happen.

the sky did not fall because we allocated resources where needed and not according to the doomsayers.

Just sent this letter to Lorrie Goldstein at Toronto Sun:

Mr. Goldstein,

I have long held the views expressed in your article and I am glad that a counter-veiling opinion is finally printed in the Canadian mainstream media.

I am also sure you are aware of the name of the architect of Kyoto, Canadian Maurice Strong, and his connections, direct and indirect, to our governments over the last forty years. His name is thrown about the 'net with regularity by conservatives and conspiracy theorists; people with too little time and/or resources to commit to a proper investigation of this man. Do our libel and slander laws prevent media organizations like yours from such an investigation? Or is Mr. Strong's influence (ie. relationships with Quebecor board members, etc.) so great that it causes Canadian media to become mute?

Please don't misconstrue this letter as an attack on you as I think you are one of the few journalists with skeptical eye on Kyoto. I am only looking to the day when Canadians are made aware of who really forms policy in this country...

Sincerely,

MRV

Ps. If you manage to write anything on Mr. Strong consider a follow-up on the Demarais family called, "Halliburton North: How Powercorp's connection to the PMO makes the Bush family look like small potatoes"!

why go to hexadecimal when we could have switched to Mussi time and knocked ourselves 600 years behind instantaneously? they do claim to have invented zero, although it has pretty much been established that zero and decimal places are Hindu.

Cows are the answer. Or cows are the problem. I'm sooooo confused. Help Mr. Wizard!

The Syracuse Post-Standard
Ready to Give It the Gas
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
By Alaina Potrikus

Morrisville State College officials are days away from turning the 7,000
gallons of manure their dairy cows produce daily into electricity.

Contractors will be on campus this week to hook up the final connections to the college's $800,000 biogas digester, a two-chamber machine that extracts gases such as methane from cow manure and transforms the gases into power.

College President Ray Cross was jubilant when he talked about getting the digester on the grid.

"We're making gas!" he said, pumping his fists in the air.

"As soon as (the contractors) turn it on, we're good to go," said Chris Nyberg, dean of the college's agricultural school.

Nyberg said the digester has been producing biogas since the fall. The machine's chambers are filled with 240,000 gallons of manure. After it is
hooked up to a generator, the 55-kilowatt machine will produce as much as half the energy the college's dairy complex uses. Currently, the biogas byproducts are burned off, creating a constant flame that dances three feet in the air.

"It's sideways when it's windy," he said.

The digester is the second step in the college's efforts to develop academic degrees and research in the field of renewable fuels. A 120-foot-tall windmill has been spinning on the hill behind the dairy barn since 2004, saving the college about $5,000 a year on its electric bill. And the college continues to work on a project that could have tractors and boilers running on New York-produced biodiesel by next year.

"I'm excited for the students of tomorrow," Cross said. "The way (the digester) is built, there are lots of access ports for study. It fits in nicely with our alternative-energy efforts."

Don't forget the killer asteroids.....that was the scare-du-jour for a while as well....

Fortran IV with $JOB Watfor. Yep, I'm a fossil too. Hell, I remember the last Ice age. Used to walk to school in waist deep snow although the waist was smaller and a lot closer to the ground back then. At least I didn't have to use the dog sled like my pa.

Global warming/cooling, this too shall pass.

I was required to be on (nursing )duty on 1 Jan 2000, because nobody knew what was going to happen. People who worked in water and electricity supply explained to me a year or so later, that all the fuss was cover for extra vigilence against an Islamist terror attack.

They had made some very overt threats, and an alert US customs agent had intercepted a car full exploives, driven by a Pakistani, I think. Bill Clinton took credit for her alertness and diligence, but, after that, and leading up to 2000, there really were increased endeavours in that regard.

So, minor computer glitches occurred. Major terrorist threats were averted. And, no, it makes little sense to bring down an entire economy for a "maybe".

I am still waiting for British-grown wine grapes to come to market. If you look at the economic history of the years of global warming, you can see that there were, indeed, many upheavals. We ought to be considering what those might be, and investing to benefit from changes. I would not like to buy Florida swampland, but Connecticut beachfront sounds like a nice place to spend my golden years.