Pirate's Cove

I thought this article might have been a joke, noting that ‘climate change’ is as about overdone and hysterical as the Y2K issue, and it sorta gave that impression early on. Alas, no

How Y2K offers a lesson for fighting climate change

Earlier this month, New York magazine published a riveting and frightening look at the future of the planet we call home.

Now that global warming is well underway, we are in for an apocalyptic awakening, and “parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century,” the writer, David Wallace-Wells, argues.

The article captured the public’s attention, quickly becoming the most-read piece in the magazine’s history. But many critics, including several climate scientists, argued that it was flawed because Wallace-Wells focused on the worst-case scenario, a pessimist’s take.

Why feed the public a too-bleak picture of the future? Why frighten people into action, rather than inspire them?

Remember, the article was too insane even for Michael Mann and many other leading Warmists. Here’s where this article dives down into insanity

Because sometimes, the worst case is the only thing that prompts us to get anything done.

I know this because I’ve studied the last time that governments, businesses and ordinary citizens joined together to combat a complex, man-made problem that threatened to wreak global havoc in the distant future.

It was a problem that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, whose technical basis was not immediately obvious to most non-specialists and which some even doubted was real at all.

It was also a fight that we won - and that we ought to be proud of winning, since it offers a blueprint for combating the many catastrophes that may arise from the technologies underpinning civilisation, including a warming planet.

I speak, of course, of Y2K.

Was Y2K a real issue? Yes. Was it the apocalyptic doom it was made out to be? Heck no. Some may be too young to remember the hysteria surrounding the issue at the time. It had the potential to cause some issues, if you weren’t smart enough to update your software (I warned a company I had worked for 2 years prior to do the update. They didn’t, and they weren’t running their backup of the data. If anyone remembers running Microsoft Access, you’ll remember how easy it was to blow your data up). For the most part, it was the media doing their doom and gloom thing.

That’s much like anthropogenic climate change. It’s overhyped and overblown. It’s a minor issue, mankind is mostly not responsible for the climatic changes, and we are not doomed in the future.

(Computer World) There’s a lesson that came out of Y2K, says Hudson. “No matter what the media says, don’t overhype a crisis. A lot of IT people just said, ‘You’ve read the papers. I need the money.’ They used the fear factor.” And, as a result, “there were credibility issues there.” Those doubts about IT were “unfair and unfounded,” Hudson says, “but nevertheless they happened.”

Are there things we can and should do about climatic changes, regardless of causation? Yes. Should the media and Warmists be hysterical? No. It gets people to tune out.