Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from July, 2015

Global Warming is a Year 2000 problem

Global Warming is a Year 2000 problem. What I mean is not that Global Warming has been solved (far from the case) nor that it is a problem that we could only have solved 15 years ago (though that might be closer to the truth). What I mean is that if we solve Global Warming, then people will think it was a hoax (or something we should not have worried about). Think back to the glory days of the 1990s. Media was full of stories about how all the world's computer systems were going to fail because programmers tried to save space on their systems by dropping the first 2 digits off the year field. Power stations and ATMs would stop working. Global financial crises would ensue (well, that did happen, but for other reasons...). Basically we were going back into the stone age unless we chucked large amounts of money at software developers to fix our computer systems and by and large that did happen. After we partied like it was 1999, apparently nothing happened. I am sure a couple