Remembering the year 2000.*
It all started with a bang, or not. What was predicted to be a possible disaster became a world-watched midnight crossover in the first country to see the new era, New Zealand.
Being the first nation directly after the international date line, New Zealand showcased the results of the five or so years of effort to thwart the effects of the primitive, first-generation computer date rollover from 2 to 4 digits.
Predictions of whole systems, normal and emergency alike, failing due to incorrect date comparisons mobilized millions of people around the world into updating modern and legacy systems that had successfully relied on two-digit dates, to now understand the full four-digit variant.
It was with bated breath that the clocks ticked over from 23:59 to 00:00 on the night of December 31st, 1999 — and the nation continued functioning without the merest hiccup.
The lesson learnt?
That by believing the unbelievable, and by separating hyperbole from real facts, necessary steps could be taken to steer disaster into a now long-forgotten what-if scenario.
What if the same effort could be applied to today’s upcoming multi-millennium bug: the environment?
Back then it was hard to convince people that the threat was real.
In today’s world, heat waves and uncharacteristic weather patterns still aren’t enough to convince enough people of the threat posed by uncontrolled global warming.
Fogy is a believer in cycles. He believes that we could be in part of a long-term cycle, something akin to what drove changes such as extinctions and mass continent shifts still felt today. Except that other factors also contributed to such effects, and today it is man himself accelerating these cyclic events — suggesting a path set on the extinction of man itself, sooner rather than later.
Why is this theme so important now?
With rollbacks in a vast range of provisions designed to help the world counter and control the human devastation ravaging the planet, there is the Wild West’s open-range policy of every man for himself. “What I can get out of this situation is more important than trying to protect the planet from something my great-grandchildren may never see.”
And this seems to be the short-sightedness of the current Trump agenda.
Fossil fuels are back! Wind power is doomed! Protective policies to help the environment are but unsigned executive orders lost in the prevailing winds, never to be signed again! Common-sense guidance and ways to benefit everyone are but faded dreams!
And a planet of like-minded, senseless, selfish politicians follows closely behind, unwilling to sacrifice popularity for the future of their distant offspring.
What the world needs now is a newer, wiser generation — willing to undo the greed tactics of the old and to begin building even stronger measures to help the planet, not to repeat the bad habits of yesteryear which no longer have a place here.
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