“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
Didn’t go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
It’s the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
No
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
There wasn’t much of a real “threat”, in that planes wouldn’t fall out of the sky. but banking systems would probably get quite confused, and potentially lead to people being unable to access money easily until it got fixed.
I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).
That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.
Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.
I use talking points like these a fair amount with Republicans. Try to get them to think back to when they were leaders in environmental policy. Get back to their roots of environmental stewardship. It seems to have moved the needle slightly.
Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you’re around then.
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
I think everything works in windows but the old windows media player. You can test it by setting the time in a windows VM to 2039.
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
At the rate of one year per year, even.
For each second that passes we’re one second closer to 2038
Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(
I can’t remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
Like the preventative measures we’re so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.
a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.
You don’t spend much time around them, do you?
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
I remember paper forms having “19__” in the year field. Good times
And didn’t they find a bunch of Chinese factories pumping them out again not long ago?
This has since been determined to have tack on benefits in the fight against the climate crisis as well, it’s halved the potential growth in global average temperatures by 2100, which cannot be overstated in just how fantastic that is.
We went from everyone being baked alive and having 20 kinds of skin cancer to boot to merely dealing with catastrophic climate change and society changing people migrations the likes of which haven’t been documented since the successive eras of steppe invasions into Europe, China, India, and the Middle East.
Out of the fire and into the frying pan.
I might just be drunk, but that was a very poetic turn of phrase.
Imagine if we did this with climate change. Imagine if we tried to switch to renewable energy en masse 20 years ago.
TBH “The whole world agreed on something” narrative doesn’t really reflect what happened.
Actually, The Industry dropped using CFC after a cheaper and luckily safer alternative has been discovered right around that time.
The fact is, most companies are fine to let an existing system run rather than replace it with one that has a cheaper consumable thing, provided they can still get that consumable and the cost of replacing that system is high.
Basically, corps would have kept buying and using CFCs because replacing the refrigeration system is too costly.
Not only was an alternative found that was cheaper and safer and almost as good (as effective), but scientists and engineers put in the effort to find ways to adapt existing systems to the new working fluid. All for significantly less than replacing the system.
Not only was a replacement found, but it was made economically viable for widespread deployment in a very short timeframe; not just having a short development time, but also a very short duration to deploy the new solution to an existing system.
You’re right, that it was cheaper and everything, but most of the time changing the working fluid of a refrigerator/air conditioning unit, will require that the system is replaced. They worked around that. Additionally, you’re correct that it was industry that made the change and pushed it to their clients.
I just want to make sure we recognise the efforts put in by the scientists and engineers that enabled the rapid switch to non-CFC based cooling systems. It’s still an amazing achievement IMO, and something that required a remarkable amount of cooperation by people who probably don’t cooperate often or at all (and are, in all likelihood, fairly hostile to eachother, most of the time).
IMO, that’s still one of the best examples of global cooperation that anyone could possibly point to. Rarely do we have a problem where there’s almost universal consensus on the issue and how to fix it. In this case, there was. That level of cooperation among the people of earth is borderline unparalleled; the only other times we cooperated this well that people would know about are usually negotiations done with the barrel of a gun. Namely the world wars. One group said that we’re going to do a thing, another group said nope. It was settled with lives, bullets and bombs, and nearly every person alive was on one side or the other… Except Sweden, I suppose… And maybe smaller countries that didn’t have enough of an army to participate. (I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons, but I’m not a historian)
Without guns, bombs, or even threats, just a presentation of the facts and a proposal for a solution, everyone just … went along with it.
To me, that’s unprecedented.
Just to be clear, are we sure that the ozone holes are still shrinking?
As far as im aware the hole in the ozone layer is basically gone
Actually there are signs it’s been growing again. Because we forget history so quick.
I see articles up to 2022 talking about it shrinking, healing on the predicted timeframe. 2023 is a huge outlier, possibly caused by a volcano, but there’s variability every year. That doesn’t mean it’s growing again
I need to look into it again, but they had found favtories in china emiting a ton of it.
Sorry I left my ozone vacuum running overnight.
Wtf was that dumbest posting about? He never learned about CFCs in 8th grade high school? Embarrassing
Matt Walsh is literally the dumbest person on the planet. Most of the people involved with The Daily Wire are cynical little freaks playing a part, Walsh is just a moron.
I’ve always hated this comparison because the two problems are just not the same, at all. CFCs were nowhere near as ubiquitous as fossil hydrocarbons, and CFCs had an essentially drop-in replacement, which fossil fuels do not. There’s no non-hydrocarbon fuel that we can just replace for coal, natural gas, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, etc. None that I’m aware of, anyway.
#transcription
Matt Walsh
@MattWalshBlogRemember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer
Derek Thompson
@DKThompWhat happened is scientists discovered chlorofluorocarbons were bad for the ozone, countries believed them, the Montreal Protocol was signed, and CFC use fell by 99.7%,l eading to the stabilization of the ozone layer, perhaps the greatest example of global cooperation in history.
I can read it fine thanks
I’m not sure what your intent was, but you’re coming off as “I don’t want online spaces to be welcoming to people who are visually impaired.”
Like me 🤣😎
Do you go around carving stairs into ramps, too?
Tell me you are dumb without telling me you are dumb
Right? Stupid science bitch making up things like “chlorofluorocarbons” and “global cooperation.”
the science bitch that invented CFCs also invented Tetra Ethyl Lead fuel additive, “leaded gasoline” was also cleaned up,… mainly.
Woow it’s impressive how you all follow the narrative. Here is your bone. Good doggie. My god
Has it occurred to you that sometimes there’s actual evidence backing up the things you ridicule?
You can go measure the acidity of rain in your back yard if you want.
The sunlight in NZ is far, far harsher than if you go a few thousand kilometres towards the equator, where it should be hotter. We have some of the world’s highest rates of skin cancer. Are you implying that crisis actors are faking having skin cancer?
