20 Years Ago

In 1994, I was working at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque. They gave me an E-mail address which ended with @www.sandia.gov

I asked my boss what the “www” stood for, and he said that it meant “world wide web”

I responded with something like “That sounds really stupid. Do I have to have that in my E-mail address?”

The winter of 1994-1995 was the year without a winter. We didn’t have a single cold day in Albuquerque that winter. I was 100% certain it was due to global warming.

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

35 Responses to 20 Years Ago

  1. norilsk says:

    Well this video from Suspicious Observers sheds some light on what might happen with the climate.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0DcpRAPk_w

  2. Password protected says:

    One does have to do some digging to get through the piles of BS. All the hype is written as though there was proof that CO2 levels control the climate.
    At the bottom of the BS pile you find nothing but conjecture.

    • B says:

      Indeed. I never believed because the believers weren’t convincing. Well I take that back, they were convincing that they were selling BS.

  3. geran says:

    “I was 100% certain it was due to global warming.”
    >>>>>>

    And, you’ve never drank kool-aid since I bet….

    • I was true believer until 2003, when I got caught in a blizzard in Cambridge on Robbie Burns Night. Snow was no longer a thing of the past.

      • geran says:

        As you well know, some folks cannot see reality when it slaps them in the face.

        The focus now is how to we teach folks to think for themselves?

      • MrX says:

        Funny! I was a hard core believer (and leftist) back then. Around 2006, someone asked me to prove that global warming was real. Wasn’t looking for anything too in depth. Just convince him. I’m a programmer, so I went out and looked at the data and was stunned at A) how bad it was (all the formatting, metadata, and temperatures were a mess) and B) how it showed the opposite in most cases.

        Once I’ve seen the data, I could no longer believe it. That’s when I flipped to the other side. That’s also when I started waking up about other things. The really funny part is where people still try to convince me otherwise thinking I’m somehow incorrect. Your posts about skewing is one of the things I found though I don’t remember it being that bad at the time. Most people just couldn’t believe it. Even now, I don’t think people get it. My main task at the time was trying to get the uncertainty from readings. Most datasets didn’t have that info. The std dev was all over the place in most of the datasets. Just horrible. I gave up on it. How anyone can state policy on such shady data is beyond me.

        • We each take different paths and for the lucky ones, we get to the right (pun intended) place. For me, it was studying economics at UD Davis in the early ’80’s that did it. I realized it was not possible for a centrally planned economy to compete with a market economy. My prediction then was that the Soviet Union would be gone in 100 years. That estimate was off by a factor of ten. With few exceptions, private property rights, free markets and profit as an incentive for resource alocation can be relied on to produce the best outcomes. And, so, too, it is with science. Free thinking individualism in the market place of ideas will always, always produce better results than when government picks winners and losers by grants to academia and funding to gov’t agencies, in return for results favored by the regime. Like you and others, I came to Real Science in search of answers. Steve was not afraid to question and to assert the facts. For too long the libprogs, with their Sol Alinsky ways, controlled the meme. Now, that tide is changing. People, free to communicate, and share ideas, are learning the truth. Rules for Radicals need not quash the debate, not today thanks to this website and others like it.

      • I was never a believer in AGW, probably because the first time I heard about it was in the late 1980’s when they were talking about tipping points. They were saying that when we got to 600 ppm it would start a feedback that would not stop until earth was like Venus. It was like talking to comet chasers who took brown acid, bunch of pot smoking Marxists, most of whom had the science aptitude of a plain bagel, toasted.

        Ever since then I knew it was a crock and bull story.

        • Ben Vorlich says:

          Yes tipping points and why hasn’t it happened before. Any sane person presented with more and more extreme predicitions should start the question the theory.

        • cdquarles says:

          Same here. I’ve been burned too many times in other disciplines plus I have been trained in differential diagnosis and data analysis. A BS graph is easy to spot, when you know what to look for. Thanks, Dr. Preceptor, for introducing me to ‘How to Lie with Statistics” 30 years ago.

      • norilsk says:

        It wasn’t until I saw the Great Global Warming Swindle film in 2009 that I woke up.

    • I went gradually from uninformed but somewhat skeptical to my current position.

      My initial skepticism was an instinctive reaction caused by my familiarity with Nazi phrenology, Progressive eugenics, Communist Lysenkoism, and concurrent exposure to various “democratic socialism” doctrines, multiculturalism, anti-nuclear power campaigns, the German acid rain and “Waldsterben” panic, American anti-official English efforts, the food pyramid, crusades against animal fats, salt, etc.

      It all looked like a duck. The same duck, really.

      After several highly emotional, screaming attacks by relatives because of my rather mild putdowns of yet another idiotic alarmist global warming exclamation, I started paying attention to the arguments of the believers and their supporting data.

      And that was that.

      • omanuel says:

        CW, there were three tyrannical powers competing in WWII:

        1. Nazi Germany
        2. Communist USSR
        3. Imperialist Japan

        Two were defeated. Stalin captured Japan’s atomic bomb plant at Konan, Korea in late August 1945 – blocked almost all news coverage of the event – and emerged victorious.

        Now, sixty-nine years later, society is spiraling toward a worldwide crash course on reality.

        Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddists, Shinto believers, astrologers et al. were told that the conclusions of their leaders were inferior to those of post-normal consensus science after 1945.

        The exact opposite is true.

        The Creator, Destroyer, and Sustainer of every atom, life and world in the solar system is the Sun’s pulsar core – powered by the source of energy that destroyed Hiroshima from the cores of Uranium atoms on 6 Aug 1945.

        https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/The_FORCE.pdf

  4. ossqss says:

    Tipping point for me after several years of questions on all avenues of data.

    http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html

  5. Mike says:

    So very strange on so many levels. I’m sure we have not met… yet… simply odd.

    • dmmcmah says:

      Did you work at Sandia? I was there from 2002-2010.

      • Mike says:

        no… I’m about as nobody as nobody gets and slightly younger than you… but I’m guessing we might know some of the same people. Don’t like to do this open. I moderate my stuff, if you want comment over on my blog and we can see who we know. If not, I fully understand. Cheers, MIke.

  6. omanuel says:

    I am convinced society is now spiraling toward collapse, after sixty-nine years of successfully hiding the source of energy from the public that:

    1. Destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945
    2. Created our elements, birthed the solar system and sustained our lives
    3. Breathed life into the cosmos with opposing but unequal forces of attraction and repulsion

    1. “Solar energy,” Journal of Solar Energy (submitted 25 July 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Preprint_Solar_Energy.pdf

    2. “The Force,” https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/The_FORCE.pdf

  7. Chewer says:

    Some folks from MIT suggested in the early 80’s that the accumulated water vapor content between the surface and mid to upper troposphere appears to max out in a cyclical fashion during the end of inter-glacial periods. After hitting the max, deposition begins again, removing water from the sea surface (dropping the level) and adding it to the land in the form of snow which ultimately lengthens the typical snow season.
    Atmospheric pressures, temperatures and overall height and capacities are driven by the several other planetary processes, with C02 and other tropospheric constituents following the lead processes.
    The reverse of this process started some 11,500 years ago, and it should be quite apparent to the most casual observer that C02 was not the primary, secondary or tertiary driver!

  8. Jimmy Haigh. says:

    “Global Warming” never passed the common sense test with me: I always knew it was a pile of shite.

    • Keitho says:

      That was me too. I used to lecture on dam design back in the day and we used the 1:100 year flood meme for spillway and freeboard parameters. I pointed out variations on 100m year cycles, overlaid with 10m cycles, overlaid with 1m years and so on down to 100 years and how we could be on a rising, falling or stable part of the curve. On that part we had higher frequency variations and so on so it became obvious to my students that variation was continuous and even trends were not very useful as they could change in so many ways.

      The issue was always one of resolution and the only use for our statistical 1:100 year flood was to provide a solid design parameter that we had all agreed on. There was nothing to prevent a 1:100 flood from being followed by another one or a 1:1000 year flood or a drought. Variability is the only constant and there is nothing we can do about it other than adapt as best we can.

      0.04% of our atmosphere is immaterial whether it goes up or down or stays the same, it is swallowed up by our huge, powerful and constantly changing atmosphere. It is fashionable for our egos to think man has some lasting effect but we are insignificant in every way.

  9. Scarface says:

    I stopped believing the global warming doomsayers when I found out that CO2 was only 0.036% of the atmosphere. Until that day I really thought it was something like 15% and going up real fast to 25% or so. I could image that would have an effect. But 0.036% to 0.04% or 0.05%? No way.
    After reading a lot about it in the next half year, I was convinced that AGW was a scam. Since then I never found one shred of evidence to make me change my mind about that. How they get away with it until this day is beyond me, but they will be exposed and they will do time.

  10. Kassu says:

    So what would make you change your mind now? (about AGW)

  11. philjourdan says:

    The joke back then was WWW = Wide world of Web.

    I got my first one (internet email) in 1990. It was an EDU. 24 years later I have another one. It really helps for discounts.

  12. nielszoo says:

    I’ve never bought into the AGW thing either. The physics just didn’t match up to the scale. When you look at the massive accomplishments of Man and then compare them to the tiny, everyday events in Nature, you begin to realize how truly powerless we are. I also had a front seat for the fraud that is government involvement in… well, everything. My father worked in air pollution mitigation and control starting back in the 60’s (for one of those evil big corporations.) Of course they did research, lab testing, trials etc. to build good, solid products that performed the almost unheard of function of cleaning up factory emissions… before the government started forcing them to do it.

    When he jumped to the government side of the fence was the real eye opener. A few years after the EPA was hatched they asked my dad’s county agency to do some air quality monitoring at a site where dioxin compounds had been dumped (back when some of them was still used in topical medications.) Dad hunted down some sensors and had them added to their portable sampling stations. He got back with the EPA and let them know he had found a sensor system that would measure some of the target dioxins with a floor of 1 ppb-v (I don’t remember the accuracy range.) The EPA then informed him that the hazardous airborne level for dioxin compounds was… you guessed it, 1 ppb-v. I then saw him go through similar fiascos with other things (like guessing what the real particulate pollution levels were for several years after Mt. St. Helens.) I decided that there was little or no science behind anything our government was doing and started treating everything as bureaucratic fiction, created as an excuse for more controls on us, unless I actually saw good science behind it. I’m still waiting for the good science part of most government regulation. The hijacking of the eco movement by the Progressives and liberal Fascists was just the nail in the coffin. Note that I use the correct definition of Fascist which is the private ownership of the means of production, but complete government control of it via law and regulation… kind of like our current federal government track.

  13. catweazle666 says:

    I was first exposed to computers in December 1964 when a few of us VIth formers went on a computer course at Nottingham University at the beginning of the Christmas holidays. They’ve come on a bit since then!

    My first modem was on a Sinclair Spectrum (!) and was capable of an awesome 300/300 baud full duplex and 1200/75 asymmetric (when it wasn’t sulking), and we used bulletin boards, subsequently when I got a PC I graduated to Compuserve.

    As to AGW, I never fell into that trap because I’d already sussed the Anthropogenic global Cooling scam, and as it was obviously the same gang that was peddling AGW, I obviously didn’t believe that either.

  14. Pathway says:

    I didn’t have to know the physics or theory because I looked at who was pushing the agenda and saw that it was the same bunch of lunatics that were pushing the ant- nuke energy and green is good junk.

  15. Jl says:

    It’s easy to figure out when you consider that the policy of the left would be exactly the same whether GW is real or not. More government, more taxes, ect.

  16. Gail Combs says:

    I never fell for CAGW. I took several geology courses in college and I am a chemist so CAGW always looked like a very queer duck to me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *