One of the things I’ve decided to spend more time on lately is reading some of several metric tons of energy and environment books I have stacked around my house. I just finished Chris Wood’s Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, which I’ll have more to say about shortly.

The next book on my list was Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, which is one of those books that supposedly “everyone” interested in climate chaos should read.[1] All I read last night was the introduction, but it contained one of those jaw-dropping, gob-smacking, statements that makes you want to shout, “Who the hell edited this thing???” and throw the book across the room.

Specifically, on page 2 Flannery says:

Whether we are crossing the road or paying the bill, it is the big, fast-moving things that command our attention. But seemingly large issues sometimes turn out to be a sideshow. The Y2K bug is one such example. Around the globe many governments and companies spent billions to prepare themselves against the threat, while others spent nothing; and 1999 gave way to 2000 with barely a hiccup, let alone an apocalypse.

There’s a technical term from computer science for this line of reasoning: Bullshit!

On a just slightly calmer note, let me make it unmistakeably clear that:

Y2k was indeed a very big, very serious problem.
The reason we had barely a hiccup when those leading digits of the year flipped was because we spent all those billions of dollars to fix the problem. Flannery’s argument is like saying that we shouldn’t spend so much money giving kids polio vaccinations because so few kids get polio any more, without recognizing the causality between those inoculations and the low rate of disease.

Why am I so sure about this? I was a programmer for IBM, where I first learned of the Y2k problem almost 20 years before that uneventful date. And not to drag Mrs. Lou into this conversation, but she was the lead project manager on a massive Y2k remediation project for a company that I absolutely guarantee everyone reading this blog has heard of.

Leading up to 1/1/2000 there was considerable discussion about how difficult it would be to fix this mess in some cases–embedded systems where it wasn’t obvious dates were used in critical calculations, and old programs that existed only in binary form, making a “simple” change to source code and a rebuild of the executable impossible. I know that not all Y2k problems were completely fixed; in some cases people had to resort to some decidedly ugly coding hacks to keep things working, and I’d bet my keyboard that in some cases all they did was set the hardware clocks back 20 or 50 years.

My point is not to beat Flannery over the head with a stack of year 2000 calendars, but to point out how easy it is for someone to make a wildly off base assumption and then follow it into a absurd conclusion. While I suspect that Flannery’s book will prove to be an excellent read, and that I will join the already huge ranks of those who call it a “must read”, on this one very narrow point, he’s flat out wrong.

I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the flip side to this situation, the people who also didn’t know diddly about computers but didn’t let that stop them from inventing an entire horror industry around the notion that Y2k would be TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it), including one very prominent peak oiler. Even months into 2000 this person was still talking about how we weren’t out of the woods yet, the financial system could still collapse, etc., and it was all balloon juice. Yet when he tells us that wind power will never work on a utility scale, and that post-peak oil we won’t have the fuel needed for the trucks and other vehicles needed to maintain wind farms, people still believe him.[2]

Was Y2k a real and very serious problem? Yes.

Was it defused because we made an extraordinary response to an extraordinary threat? Yes.

Therefore, I’m begging everyone who reads this site to take a deep breath and be as objective as you can about climate chaos and peak oil and the looming water and food issues around the world, among the other very real monsters under our bed. Carelessly denying either their existence (or the scale of the threat they pose) or our ability to rise to a challenge will get us nowhere.

[1] Yes, I really am woefully behind on my reading, and I should have gotten to Flannery’s book much sooner. As penance, I will spend an hour sorting through my neighbor’s garbage, pulling out the recycleables that he’s too lazy to separate.

[2] No, I’m not going to name him (again), and you get no bonus points for figuring out who it was.