We'll never forget New Year's Eve 1999. We had been at a party somewhere or other, and were walking along a street, either heading for the subway or hailing a cab, when it hit us: It was 2000--that is, "Y2K"--and nothing had happened. No planes falling from the sky, no centenarians carted off to first-grade classrooms, no hordes trapped on malfunctioning escalators. All the alarmist hype we'd heard through the late 1990s turned out to be baloney--just as we had long suspected.
This has colored our view of other alarmist predictions. Opponents of Iraq's liberation warned that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction on U.S. troops and that America's presence in Iraq would spur more terrorism, yet although Iraq has proved to be a slog, these claims were balderdash. Similarly, the Y2K experience is one reason we find it hard to take "global warming" seriously.
Of course, we could be wrong. Sometimes alarming news is in accord with alarming predictions. Peggy Noonan more or less predicted 9/11 (and Bill Clinton's evasion of responsibility for it) in a Jan. 19, 2001, column, and we don't remember being particularly perturbed as we edited it.
Now it turns out that there was a Y2K bug--and it contributed to global warming hype. Michael Asher of DailyTech.com has the story:
My earlier column(http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+over+NOAA+Climate+Data/article8347.htm) this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.
These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. . . .
NASA has now silently released corrected figures(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt), and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.
This almost sounds too good to be true: The one Y2K bug that happened to slip through was the one that contributed to another alarmist narrative. But when you think about it, it makes sense. NASA's faulty findings didn't look faulty to global warmists, who saw exactly what they were expecting to see.
* But Y2K turns out to have a kernel of truth.
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