Some of the panic and mainstream speculation was ridiculous (airplanes falling out of the sky, etc.), but yes, a ton of work went into fixing the various y2k bu

Some of the panic and mainstream speculation was ridiculous (airplanes falling out of the sky, etc.), but yes, a ton of work went into fixing the various y2k bugs in a large percentage of the world's software, which is why the event passed so smoothly. We can only hope that a similar mobilization results in people of the future opining on how climate change wasn't such a big deal after all, but given the current trends* I'm not betting on it. *Despite Crichton's assertions, we do know some things about the future. The sun will come up tomorrow; soon it will be autumn and then winter (at least here in the northern hemisphere), and given the current atmospheric level of greenhouse gasses and the amounts being emitted, the earth will continue to warm beyond the current level. We can in fact very accurately model the amount of warming over the long term, although of course we can not precisely predict the day to day or even year to year changes, as there are a number of other factors that add randomness to the result over the short and medium term. To use an analogy, if I plug my bathtub drains and turn on the faucet, I can predict that absent some intervention there will be mopping in my future.