Friday
Oct142011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Speaking of books
Oct 14, 2011 Climate: other Donna Laframboise's new book about the IPCC is out. It looks like this is going to be a good one:
Blooming brilliant. Devastating" - Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
"...shines a hard light on the rotten heart of the IPCC" - Richard Tol, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change and convening lead author of the IPCC
"...you need to read this book. Its implications are far-reaching and the need to begin acting on them is urgent." - Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Reader Comments (186)
Jiminy:
Y2K was a real and worrying problem. If the two-digit references that undoubtedly existed throughout the software commonly employed by large organisations – the result of an irresponsible oversight by the IT industry – had not been detected and fixed there were plainly going to be problems, many potentially serious. Fixing it did not require the help of your consultant buddies. It didn’t require esoteric computer skills. The thankless grunt work was largely done by middle ranking internal staff dragging their way through line after line of dense computer code, some of it about thirty years old. Commonly without the original source code - and often while continuing to run their daily work. And, once “fixed” it had to be tested … etc. An exceptionally boring and unglamorous undertaking.
In the meantime, most of your ambitious, highly paid IT “experts” were busily pumping up the dotcom bubble. And look where that got us.
But we’re drifting way off topic. My point is that Donna marred her otherwise excellent book by mistakenly equating CAGW with Y2K. If there is a parallel, it’s this: just as the commentariat is completely wrong about Y2K (“it was a hoax”), so it’s completely wrong about CAGW (“it’s a terrible threat”).
"Donna marred her otherwise excellent book..."
While it may be wrong to say that Y2K was a non-existent problem, the media and social dynamics that accompanied Y2K had all the hallmarks of a social scare. In that sense, it was a hoax
CAGW is worse. At least in Y2k, there was something to be worried about. The code existed. It was there, physically, inside all those computers. CAGW is not even there. It is a double hoax.
I’m sorry Shub but that’s a complete misreading of Y2K. If it was a real problem (and, as you say, it was), a warning that something had to be done about it could hardly have been a hoax. CAGW is utterly different.
In truth, the media’s attitude to Y2K was not as you seem to think. Bored by the thought of trying to understand the problem, it was (mostly) looking for scare stories. And it wanted them so it could demonstrate how daft it all was. Thus it continually pressed interviewees for examples of how bad it could be. And that’s all that was then reported - for interviewees it was a regular irritation (I, for example, insisted whenever possible on doing live interviews). Worse, when it couldn’t get the necessary response, it made it up – e.g. the constant “experts tell us that planes will fall from the sky” report. No “expert” said that. And that’s why, when some journalists, media commentators, prominent politicians and others (usually who had made little attempt to understand the issue) made predictions of disaster that went well beyond legitimate warning, they were eagerly reported by the media. They were being set up. And that, in turn, is why the media pounced with cries of hoax when the outcome was relatively benign – an outcome those of us who were involved had been working to achieve.
CAGW is, as I say, utterly different. Here – as you know well – the media is totally signed up to the alarmist agenda. Do alarmist experts worry when their views are exaggerated? Er ... no.
I stick to my point: unfortunately, Donna marred her otherwise excellent book by mistakenly equating CAGW with Y2K.
Personally I see very little difference between what you describe as the media reaction to Y2K and the media reaction to AGW. In fact if you were to substitute 'AGW' for 'Y2K' in the opening sentence I doubt anyone would be disagreeing with what you say.
Whether or not Y2K was a genuine problem that needed to be addressed is not relevant. Donna makes the point that both are/were scares that are being/were hyped out of all proportion to their actual effects.
If you were beavering away unhonoured and unsung trying to keep the lights on (so to speak) good for you. If Richard Betts is beavering away in a similar cause then bully for him. The comparison is a perfectly fair one.
@Robin Guenier
If Y2K had not been sold as a potential disaster (the necessary mitigation costing us millions of ££) what is the worst that could have happened? A few ridiculous gas bills as the numbers cycled through 999 back to zero? Embarrassment for the banks having to deal with indignant customers receiving ludicrous statements perhaps? No. There would have been but nothing immediately obvious even to the untrained eye. Certainly not aeroplanes falling out of the sky. You were had Robin. Y2K was a literally fabulous example of little boy crying wolf. Likewise Donna's teenager and the IPCC.
Mike Jackson
So you “see very little difference between what [I] describe as the media reaction to Y2K and the media reaction to AGW”. Yet your limited extract omits my “it [the media] was (mostly) looking for scare stories. And it wanted them so it could demonstrate how daft it all was.” Do you really think that’s how the media sees CAGW? And do you really think that, as I went on to say, “alarmist experts worry when their views are exaggerated”?
No, the Y2K/CAGW comparison is inaccurate and misleading.
simon abingdon
So you think I was “had” eh? Well, read this and tell me where I got it wrong. Here’s an extract – as I say, a simple example of a failure that came to light in 2002:
Do you think those women would agree that what happened to them was not “immediately obvious even to the untrained eye”? And would you perhaps have advocated that the NHS need do nothing about the vast numbers of dates used for a huge range of purposes: from scheduling operations, though periodic tests of children with chronic conditions, to “use-by” dates for drugs? Had the NHS agreed with your view that it would be a waste of money and effort to institute its massive and costly Year 2000 compliance programme, vastly more people would have been affected than those unfortunate women in Yorkshire. And that's just the NHS. Little boy crying wolf? I don’t think so.
I had a look and after a couple of minutes came across the argument that because economic models didn't work climate models couldn't work. This is in the same bit where she trots out the old chestnut that because CO2 is a small percentage of the atmosphere doubling that percentage is irrelevant. And this is just in the free preview section.
I don't mind journalists examinging the issues, but when they are incapable of basic logical argument and reasoning I am afraid their conclusions are worthless. The author makes even Delingpole look like an academic genius I'm afraid - and that's not a sentence I ever thought I would compose :-)
The book is junk. The very fact that it is only published electronically when climate denial is one of the current trendy topics is a bit of a clue.
I have only two chapters left to read of Donna L.'s new book.
Of the several valuable contributions of her book, I think one of the most important is its 'call-to-arms' for more objective skepticism the community of journalism that is focused on the climate/environment.
In that endeavor, if she gets even just a hand full of them stimulated that will be an important achievement. These things can grow exponentially.
Thank you Donna.
John
Robin, thank you for your response, to which I reply.
The incidence of Down's syndrome in women over 35 is about 1 in 250, so maybe 1 or 2 women in your example might not have been called for screening when they should have been. Their GPs would almost certainly have queried the oversight, especially if they had been prompted to be on the lookout for such problems as 2000 approached. In any case you seem to be admitting that despite the huge sums of money thrown at the problem they failed to prevent those unfortunate women from Yorkshire from giving birth to Down's syndrome babies anyway.
Your next two examples, problems with "scheduling operations [and] periodic tests of children with chronic conditions" would similarly soon have come to light via the "normal" channels.
As for your final example of “use-by” dates for drugs, any drug labelled with an "impossible" date would have drawn immediate attention to itself.
Computer systems always have undetected errors which occasionally produce anomalous results which are then routinely corrected. The cost of correcting any such error is normally trivial and although there might have been a clustering of errors around the beginning of 2000 the idea that this was a potentially catastrophic problem which could have been averted only by a programme costing millions of pounds seems to me quite lacking in any reasonable sense of proportion.
Robin, I apologise for saying you were "had". That was uncalled for: you were only doing your job. But I stand by my view that the NHS's response to a hugely overexaggerated "Y2K" was totally incommensurate with the true scale of the problem, and all too typical of its profligacy in spending the long-suffering taxpayer's money.
Regards, simon
@Nick (Scots R.)... I see you posted the exact same on Amazon as a review. Have you actually read the book?
So any facts you may glean from the book are useless because the conclusions you do not agree with.
Enlightenment.
You gave it one star? Called it puerile? Quite strong? For a book you may not actually have read?
And you call Donna puerile?
Oct 16, 2011 at 5:14 PM | Scots Renewables
I hesitate to engage your eminance, who is obviously much smarter than anyone who doesn't agree with you, but you might be interested in this, which was linked in the Bish's original post.
Of course, given your obvious confirmation bias, I suppose nothing less than a full bound leather edition will meet your requirements.
I thank a commenter over on WUWT (on the thread about Donna L.'s new book) for giving info about how Donna L.’s new book is selling:
It would be interesting to hear from Donna L about whether that was the projected sales response within several days after the book was released.
John
Robin, you say:
"In truth, the media’s attitude to Y2K was not as you seem to think. Bored by the thought of trying to understand the problem, it was (mostly) looking for scare stories. "
Please read what I said. I don't think we are in disagreement.
More to our point why the media turned Y2k into a scare story, in its specific case, is not as important as the fact that it did indeed do so.
In the same vein, that the media participates in the collective modern phenomenon of the generation of social scares cannot be denied.
There is a reason why simon says you've been had. As an insider, you understand the specifics and the substantive reality of the Y2K problem. At the same time, you were clearly irked by the inflation of the issue by the media at the time.
This is exactly what would transpire during a social scare - a partly/wholly emergent phenomenon which utilizes expert voices for the purposes of hype during its ascendant phase.
In other words, what was being sold was not what the problem really was. But the experts will not/cannot object during the propagation of the scare. Maybe that was the position you were in.
Thanks, Simon. But you won’t be surprised that I disagree.
The point about the Sheffield example is that it’s the exception that proves the rule: despite the money spent, that one was missed. It therefore illustrates the fact that, had no money been spent (as I take you would have advocated), such problems (and many other date-related problems – mine were just a few examples) might well have been widespread. Doubtless they would have “come to light” – but all at around the same time. It would not have been “routine”: remediation is most unlikely to have been “trivial”, the chaos might have been hard to manage (and NHS management is not always the best) and people would quite probably have been damaged. As for “use-by” dates – well it was reported that, before 2000, a computer at an M&S warehouse required new canned goods to be discarded because their bar codes indicated sell-by dates of “02” – which it read as meaning 1902, not 2002. Are you quite sure that something similar couldn’t have happened to the NHS?
My point is to counter your interesting view that, had nothing been done, there might have been some problems “but nothing immediately obvious even to the untrained eye.” So as not to impose on the Bishop’s hospitality, I’ll provide another example by referring you to my paper. Have a look at pages 17 and 18 (about the “Y2.01K” problem). Problems with 30 million bank cards would, I suggest, have been noticed, even by that untrained eye – and costing £270 million (about the same as the average UK clearing bank spent on the entire problem) was rather more than an “embarrassment”.
Shub:
Yes, we’re in a measure of agreement. I certainly agree that it’s interesting to consider why the media turned these issues into scare stories. My point was to contrast the media’s treatment of Y2K with its treatment of CAGW. I believe that, re Y2K, it was happy to treat it as a scare story because it wanted to underline its real belief that it was really foolish millenarian nonsense (if I had time and would not be imposing on his Grace’s space, I’d tell you of my experience with the Today programme). In contrast, I suggest that it’s happy to treat CAGW as a scare story partly because (unlike Y2K) that's what the "experts" are telling them and partly because it believes it has an important role in promoting the warmist agenda.
But I would also agree that the media’s participation in "the collective modern phenomenon of the generation of social scares" was/is also a part of both. And, yes, to an extent we were “used” – and it was irritating. But, you know, I have to concede that it helped somewhat in drawing attention to the matter – and therefore it helped us in getting things done. Of course, when the outcome was largely benign, the media gave us no credit – on the contrary. But I’ve learned to live with that.
And, as I said above, Donna was nonetheless wrong: the much-maligned "experts" didn't get Y2K wrong. They issued warnings – people listened and did what was necessary to fix a real and seriously worrying problem. We should be glad that they did.
Robin
I should have made myself clearer.
Agreed that the media described Y2K as a hoax and AGW as the worst thing to hit the planet since ..., but it was the media that initially hyped the Y2K problem beyond what was justified in order to knock it down just as they are currently hyping CAGW (whether to evsntually knock it down only time will tell!).
I stand by my comment that there is a marked resemblance between the media treatment of the two even though they may be doing it for different reasons.
Both events were hyped. The public was fed a media scare story which did not stand up to scrutiny. To compare the media treatment of the two is fair comment.
Oct 16, 2011 at 7:38 AM | Unregistered Commenter Jiminy Cricket
Oct 16, 2011 at 2:16 PM | Unregistered Commenter Shub
(et al)
As a "beneficiary" of the Y2K scare I would like to argue that it was real, very real, and I (along with thousands of other unsung heroes) saved the world as we know it.
I would like to argue that, but honesty won't permit me. I enjoyed two and a half years of steady and profitable (well, profitable to my company which charged my daily salary per hour of my services) employment testing/auditing/correcting/certifying systems for Y2K compliance. Even when I found a system with an issue, it never turned out to produce a catastrophic failure.
Y2k a problem (small "p") yes, but a pending disaster, never!
The only difference between AGW and Y2K is that AGW isn't even a problem.
Well, Mike Jackson and dadgervais, the question, I suppose is this: had nothing (or very little) been done about Y2K, would it have “turned out to produce a catastrophic failure” or “a pending disaster”? You obviously think not. And, for my part, I tried not to think about it as it would have meant that my colleagues and I had failed. And we were determined not to fail – nor did we expect to. Nor did we. But I have to say that the only logical answer has to be "yes, it possibly would".
Here’s what the Governor of the Bank of England said in early 1998:
I think he was right. So fears about the eventual outcome were justified. And, as I say in my paper, maybe it was (just about) understandable that some journalists, media commentators, prominent politicians and others (usually who had made little attempt to understand the issue) made predictions of disaster that went well beyond legitimate warning about the probable consequence of failure to act. But does that actually “justify” the undoubted hype? No, Mike, I don’t think so.
So, although I accept “that there is a marked resemblance between the media treatment of the two”, that most certainly doesn’t mean that Donna is right when she suggests that those drawing attention to the Y2K problem were wrong and “that potentially hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent finding a cure for cancer were flushed down the toilet by governments and corporations in a mad rush to avert an imaginary Y2K catastrophe”. They weren’t and it wasn’t imaginary.
Robin, I started to read your paper, making notes.
"2. Background
The Y2K problem derives from the common and useful practice of using two
digits rather than four to designate a year – common because itʼs an easy
shortcut."
Not so. The use of two digits rather than four harks back to the days when data storage space in programs was at a premium. This gradually ceased to be a problem by the early eighties (in my recollection). Even in the early days of computing the idea that it provided any “easy shortcut” is baseless.
As I read on, I found you admitting that this was so. The imagined Y2K problem concerned only code written decades previously. The whole world had moved on since then Robin. Even the grand NHS systems of the current era were (jerry) built from scratch by incompetents around the turn of the century, costing untold misspent millions and perpetuating the myth that the Y2K "problem" provided a cautionary exemplar of the necessity for large computer systems to require hyper-expensive development and validation. Employ people who don't know what they're doing and you've got problems, end of millenium or not.
The only evidence for a genuinely serious problem that survives in your paper seems to be the tragic story of the Yorkshire women with Down's Syndrome babies whose (vague) numbers do not tally with the probability that your account (computer error meant that very significant numbers of such women were not called for screening) can be justified given the published statistics of Down's Syndrome incidence in middle-age mothers.
Regards, simon
Just to chip in again on Y2K; in 1999 I was working for a financial services company with three separate legacy operating systems, based on IBM's AS400, which had been running in parallel and virtually unchanged since the 1980s. Almost all the dates on our screens had two-digit years. We had hundreds of financial products of various kinds, and many thousands of customers. Turning the clock back to 1900 would mean that a customer born in 1960, for instance, would be minus 60 years old, and thus ineligible for any of our products. In fact, being of similar minus ages, no prospective new customers would have been eligible! This would perhaps not have been ideal for the business. Our systems would also have been under the sudden impression that they were trying to debit thousands of existing customers or pay their claims in the time of Queen Victoria (who would, sadly, have been a little too elderly to take out one of our policies herself, even in 1900.) Our systems would have been somewhat confused, to say the least. They would have stopped dead in their tracks, plaintively uttering the AS400 equivalent of "WTF???". They would not have been altogether happy systems. As for us lowly human assets, we would have probably been unaware of airliners tumbling from the skies or nuclear power plants exploding nearby, as we would have all been... let's say, otherwise engaged.
gentlemen,
This thread is about Donna's book about IPCC. Not the sodding Y2K issue.
Robin Guenier and the rest, just please discuss Y2K in a separate thread as you all have effectively hijacked this thread off the main topic.
Simon:
You’re obviously not reading that paper carefully: I specifically state that the issue arose because of code written in the 1960s and 1970s when computer memory was very expensive. But that itself wasn’t the problem. Here’s what I said:
If you think that didn’t matter, read Alex Cull’s comment above.
As it turned out, the outcome was relatively benign: i.e. there were few serious problems and, so far as I'm aware, no “knock-on” effects. Here’s another quote:
BTW I’d be interested to know why you think that, for example, the banking problem in Germany (page 18) wasn’t serious. As for NHS IT, your suggestion that I think Y2K demonstrated the need for systems requiring “hyper-expensive development and validation” is absurd: read this (scroll down to my article).
PS: but, as Venter says, we're getting seriously off topic.
Venter:
The only reason I originally mentioned Y2K was to note that Donna, by drawing a parallel with CAGW (suggesting that the much-maligned "experts" got Y2K wrong), had marred an otherwise excellent book. (As I said, it’s otherwise "a remarkable piece of calm, professional, investigative journalism and a valuable source of evidence to counter repeated claims that the IPCC must be regarded as the ultimate authority on climate change".) I have pointed out a couple of times that the ensuing debate is drifting off topic.
No disrepect to anyone here, but having read Donna's expose of the IPCC, Y2K gets one brief mention towards the conclusion. Why then have there been so many posts on the Y2K issue on this thread? It is an issue peripheral to the thrust of Donna's book; such comments are certainly distracting - and irrelevant to - the case she has presented against the IPCC.
tertius: er … rather more than “one brief mention”: try a search, and note also the book's links to her lengthy articles about the topic. But you’re right – it’s an issue peripheral to the thrust of Donna’s book. See my comment to Venter above.
So, back on topic - Nick's (Scots Renewables) comment that Teenager having been published electronically confirms its junk status, I find curious. The speed, power, convenience and flexibility of the internet are some of the reasons why IPCC's AR4 has been exposed to such devastating scrutiny, in the first place - imagine a world where there was no net and dissemination/criticism of AR4 was being carried out mostly via print media (as AR1 would surely have been, back in 1990). It hardly bears thinking about. Thanks to online investigators such as Donna, AR5, when it arrives, will come under truly ferocious forensic analysis, and Dr Pachauri's statement that "we function on a very transparent basis" will become an actuality. Therefore, I'd have thought that first publishing this book electronically and in multiple formats, with links, and publicising it on blogs, then following this up with a paper edition, is precisely the way to go.
Sorry, I retract the comment about electronic publication - which was not only untrue but also unfair and essentially irelevant. My other observations about Ms. Leframboise's comments on CO2 concentrations and computer models in general in the Modeling section remain valid though. She should stick to reportage and refrain from criticising aspects of the science she apparently does not understand, as this weakens rather than strengthens heer credibility and is an instant turn-off for many of us.
And - I don't understand either why this has turned into a discussion of Y2K ??
@ Scots
The point Donna makes about models being unable to predict gold prices is IMHO a highly relevant one.
A model of the climate that purports to predict what it will do in 100 years' time must contain a number of key inputs, among them population, general and specific technology levels, and energy cost. The fundamental issue many of us have with such models is that their output is certainly rubbish.
In 1911 nobody could have accurately predicted today's population, nobody could have predicted that we'd be getting large amounts of power from a technology basically unknown in 1911, nobody predicted the internet, supermarkets, and so on, and nobody predicted either the primacy, much less the price, of oil.
All these issues remain true today. There is no forecaster who produces respected or relied-on predictions of the price of oil 10 years, 5 years, 1 year or even 1 week ahead. To produce a 100-year climate model one must, however, use assumptions for exactly such a variable, despite the fact that the task is fundamentally impossible.
If it is impossible to produce something as relatively simple as a 1-week oil price model then a 100-year climate model that strings a whole load of equally fanciful, unverifiable assumptions together is simply angels dancing on the head of a pin. It's the Drake equation; the answer is any number you care to make up.
There is really only one thing we can be sure of, which is that the cost of all things will fall over the next 100 years and that the world will continue to move towards lower-carbon energy, both of which developments have been proceeding for a couple of hundred years without any help from Big Green. We've gone from wood to coal to oil to gas to nuclear of our own volition, and will continue to do so. If you look at air pollution over time you will struggle to identify when clean air acts were introduced, just as if you look at incidence of polio you'll struggle to see when childhood vaccination against polio came in.
I find your handle slightly baffling because anyone who has studied the matter will be aware that renewables are no such thing, and that sustainability is unsustainable. "Sustainable" development has only been possible in the past because we had fossil fuels.
For example, the diesel yield of oil seed rape per acre is about half a tonne. The area of the UK is 66 million acres, of which about a quarter is arable suitable for growing rape. If we went over to "sustainable" diesel, we'd get 8 million tonnes of diesel a year off that land, yet the UK annually uses 90 million tonnes of oil. So we'd need to plant 11 times the arable area, and of course we'd also need somewhere else besides to grow the food we're no longer growing.
What's sustainable about that, exactly, or about any other supposedly sustainable technology? In effect fossil fuels increase the size of the planet while sustainables shrink it, which seems a very odd definition of sustainable.
My first impression was that Donna's book was at risk of becoming a litany and that I had heard most of it before, but many of (especially) the later chapters are excellent and long before I finished I could understand why Matt Ridley had praised it so highly.
Overall it is by far the most damning critique of the IPCC I have ever read.
Apart from at times making your blood boil, it leaves you wondering how they have managed to be allowed to get away with it so far and how they can ever be stopped.
J4R
One of the main worries in London at the turn of the 20th century was that within 10 years the streets would be 10 feet deep in horse shit.
Henry Ford: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted they would have said 'a faster horse'.
It doesn't take a genius to work out that we do not have a clue what the world is going to look like in 100 years or even 50, or perhaps even 10.
Why are we so convinced that "this time it will be differnt"? Are we going to stop inventing things? Are we suddenly going to lose our ability to adapt as new discoveries are made or as old products or materials become obsolete or scarce?
And above all, as you surely rightly point out, why should the next 100 years be any different from the last 100 in terms of human development, improvement in health and general welfare, and a better environment and better living standards?
Why is that some people's glass is always half empty?
Go easy on poor RenewableScotsNick, he's conflicted and in the pay of big oil
"Automotive, engineering and energy sites vary from a one man car dealership to an international oil and gas service company - and we have created sites for all of them in our time."
Gleick's "review" over on Amazon is funnier and makes Donna's point for her.
If this review actually is from Peter Gleick, then God help his reputation, for it is a bad review; ) In a way that "bad" clearly doesn't seem intended upon the reviewee:)
Every comment in rebutal, not only rebuts firmly, but does so in a measured way that makes me think the US Amazon site has a far better quality of reviewer who cut to the chase quickly.
Gleick should sue if it isn't actually he who wrote the original.
Gleick alleged review
O/T but......Atomic Hairdryer.....looking for an academic bookshop in sunny Dublin. When in Dublin some years ago I visited a bookshop in Dublin's CBD. I was intrigued to find a coffee shop in the rear of the premises. I was even more intrigued to find university students working on projects and using reference books off the shelves while taking several hours to consume a cup of coffee. What an enlightened book store owner. He knew that these students would return as postgrads and become loyal, lifelong customers.
Loved it!
Y2K
My company spent a lot of time and OUR money, fixing issues and working with our customers with respect to Y2K..
Of course the media hyped, it nuclear plants and planes falling out of the sky, etc.. LOts of opinionaters and idiots shouted outthe world wasgoingto end, and the media indulged them (Gillian Anderson, was one If I remeber, her of 'No Pressure' fame.
The irony there, is the nuclear systems had very good programmers that thought ahead and a cuture and the processes of safety and planing and QC. and we actually spent quite a lot of money hiring former nuclear programmers as contractors to sort out some old bank systems, with an inmoveable deadline, partly why the supposed dot com boom happened, ie it coinced with a lot of y2k work (MAINLY verification) many companies rather than verify their old system, brought forwards plans for new systems, all a tthe same time. partly why contracting rates went though the roof.. and partly why IT work crashed in 2000 ( a number of years of new systems forward projects, all brought forward)
Real problemsif nothing done ... well one banking sysem, had Y2k hardware/software issues. It did take a few months to sort out.. carefully, not a rush job, etc
If we ignored it.. well their would have been issues with bank balance. etc,etc and all sorts of confusion.
which would have caused the bank to stop atm withdrawals... (this was at OUR cost)
Given what happened to Northern Rock, a bank run, would NOT have been pretty...
Lest anybody be misled, the Y2K problems Alex Cull referred to above were not related to the IBM AS/400 operating system...which was in many ways ahead of its time.
One of the reasons for its popularity was that it was able to seamlessly run a wide variety of legacy software written for a diversity of earlier systems. Customers liked the idea that they could move to an advanced operating system wthout having to rewrite their old programs. And so it is likely that Alex's problems wth dates harked back to stuff written in the early 1970s for the S/32 or S/34. And in those days programmers were indeed under pressure to save space...in both main and disk memory. The AS/400 itself was perfectly capable of handling Y2K issues from its inception in 1988. I was involved in European Technical Support for the platform across 1999-2000 and it was (for us at least) a non-issue.
For many the AS/400 remains a fine example of a machine that was ahead of its time. Please do not (even unintentionally) mislead today's public about its capabilities.
Now..back to climate stuff...........