Deniers Denied.
Spoke to Bob Zimmerman, author "Universe in a Mirror," Tuesday 8, and speaking to Robert Eshelman, Nation, on Wed 9, both re Copenhagen, yet from diverse points of view. The diversity is critical. Zimerman and I spoke the Climategate, an issue that looms in significance as the climate change warmists press their case that the hacked-emails are nothing a footnote, and as the skeptics press the case that the global warming scientists are not to be trusted, having been caught out on changing tree-ring data from mid-20th century. Why trust a falsifier? The global warming team does not provide an answer. Instead what comes across is that this has turned into a partisan boxing match. Above hosts Rachel Maddow and Andrew Mitchell, representing MSNBC cable, which is self-consciously associated with the Obama administration's team, speak of Climategate as a trivial matter and treat those who challenge the data and the conclusions as "deniers." News to me that this term is regarded as prejudicial and a smear -- as in a Holocaust-denier. What I also learn from the above colloquy of two people who are being paid sizable sums in order to speak of Climategate as insignificant, not from the facts but from their team allegiance, is that the global warmists have not yet found a defensive strategy that works. Attacking the critic is not a promising solution to a problem, just a momentary tactic. It does not answer the doubts that you have a weakness.
What Warm Problem?
I have learned to frame the story not in terms of tree-rings and ice cores but rather in terms of centuries. The warmist case argues that it is warmer now than it was 150 years ago, and that is a direct result of man-man green-house gases such as CO2 from our carbon-based energy generation. But this is not proved. We may be warmer because of natural events, such as the sun-spots that Zimmerman and I watch closely. The more important comparison is between the 21st century and the 11th century. The warmists at East Anglia know this. So do the skeptics. And what does the data support? No definite conclusions. It was warm in the 11th century. That was about the time that the Norse went a-Viking as far as Greenland and North America -- when the Vikings reached Maine. The fabled Vinland map is from that warm period, and the Greenland settlements followed. The Little Ice Age that followed int he 16th century (associated with no sunspots for decades) shut off the Greenland colonies and also froze the top of pails of milk in Shakespeare's age. Why was it warm in the 11th century? Why did it get much colder in the 16th? Was it as warm in the 11th as now. Can we get as cold as the 16th again without changing anything? Unknown at this time. Need more data. Need trusthworthy data.
Warm Bolivia.
Rob Eshelman tells me from Copenhagen of his conversation with Evo Morales's Climate ambsssador to Copenhagen, Salon, who argues that the problem is not the climate alone but the abuse of "Mother Earth" by the developed nations of the United States and Western Europe. Bolivia advocates a"Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth" that rejects cap and trade solutions and wants the developed states to pay damages done to the planet to compensate the developing nations as they rise. In sum, Bolivia, and we can presume also Venezuela and other allies of Hug Chavez, want a planet not just cooler but also a world turned upside down. Once you begin talking about the future of the planet, there is no end to the stuff dreams are made of. The warm shall be cool; the last shall be first.
Mr. Batchelor you address the subject of Climate change with clarity and objectivity as you so often do. There something lacking in our national media these days and I believe it is objectiveness. For many years, I believe the major television networks have had a left of center slant on their reporting of the news. I guess this is what draws me to seek out alternative news sources such as your show. In regards to MSNBC, I do not know anybody that even watches that station. I can appreciate alternative views but the commentators on that station are way to out there for me.
Evo Morales's climate ambassador may well have let the cat out of the bag and articulated for us what's really at stake. For those whose aim it is to turn the world upside down, 'climate gate' is indeed only a footnote. Whereas 'global warming' is merely a previously effective tool that has worn dull, the thrust toward 'socio-economic justice'; progressivism, i.e. communism and, hence, toward reaching that first inevitable step to its world-wide implementation, remains vibrant and dangerous as ever. ‘Vibrant’, because enough has now been put in place (including a leader, sympathetic to the cause, in the target country); and, ’dangerous’, because what is envisioned has never worked, cannot work, and will never work as advertised.
When Karl Marx wrote “Das Kapital”, the march of ‘fellow travelers’ into that vaunted bloody revolution and beyond was confined to occur within the borders of any given nation state. Since then, the world has grown considerably smaller; boundaries have become blurred. The prize, so desperately sought by the communists has always been that hugely successful bastion of unabridged capitalism, America. It was difficult to turn America against itself, especially on the basis of the economic argument alone. In America, after all, the poor tended to have many more advantages than the richest do in much of the rest of the world. The mission of the communist crusaders needed to be slightly modified. It would become necessary to turn the rest of the world against America.
‘Global warming’ was tailor made to bring this about. Even Americans in significant numbers were recruited to the effort. In fact, so much in resource and emotion was invested in the project, it became too big to fail. So, when the science propping it up proved fraudulent, enough else was already in place as to reduce the potentially explosive University of East Anglica e-mail disclosures to merely a passing mention. Leftist governments (including the U.S.), media, academe and public opinion were all already committed to a fool’s errand. The most powerful people in the world had already placed their bets. It would only become a matter of riding out the squall and pretend nothing had been revealed.
It will be interesting to note how many eyes Bolivia’s representative’s frank talk at the climate summit in Copenhagen will have opened. My guess is none; apart, of course, from eliciting howls from the skeptic choir that already stands excluded, denounced; discredited; ignored.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
THE BLIZZARD OF 2010
Sometime during the blizzard of 2010 will be a good time to discuss global warming.
THE SOCIAL CONFORMITY OF THE 1950s IS THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OF TODAY.
Only PC is far worse and far more dangerous.
It's no longer true that all politics are local. But I still have to ask: Didn't the MSM in New York notice that this summer was cold and wet? And the same is true of more than a few summers in the past. I guess they just can't believe their lying eyes. Or that Emperor Obama has no clothes.
Independent thinking has gone the way of the dinosaur. And it's a good thing that dinosaurs are gone. After all, didn't they cause the last global warming?
Also a good time to vote on Cap & Trade
Who would benefit from a cooler earth? Africa? Central and South America? India?
Would drier climates like Saharan Africa, India, and Australia receive more rainfall? Impossible to tell and we now know impossible to model.
Now when I hear a talking head mention "research from XXXX university reveal that Homelessness is increasing" we can be assured that the data has been milked, filtered, spun, and modeled to come to a conclusion that was known before the data are collected.
Alma Mater does an index of Social standards: poverty, Homelessness, single parenthood, etc. Very famous report. Press only notices when a Republican is in the White House, even though the data have been collected for over 40 years.
Along with the need for continued government support, the Warmers need the undying adoration of MSM around the world. Come to the wrong Conclusion and you get ridiculed in Scientific American, MSNBC, the Beeb, The Nation, etc.
When is Saturday Night Live going to do a parody of Rachel Maddow? They might enlist Seth Meyers or Bill Hader to mimic her. It might be funnier than Tina Fey's Sarah Palin. Nothing will top last year's NY accidental Governor David Patterson routine. Will SNL tackle global warming? Is there no humor in science?
I don’t know how things are where you-all live, but the scruffy mid-South city that I call home got the kind of snowfall the other day that winter normally saves up for the dreary gray month of February. My Yankee girlfriend and her fractious chowbradors loved the couple of inches we got. My cats and I, on the other hand, hated it, and the terrible wind we were subjected to--like something out of *a J.G. Ballard disaster tale*--did absolutely nothing to raise our spirits.
The snow has left, at least for now, but the low temperatures remain. Now that the backyard no longer tempts my two cats, Klaus and Sunny will just have to find other ways to amuse themselves that I hope don’t involve ambushing the dogs, who have already suffered quite enough from that pair's nearly Islamic hatred of canines, thank you. Fortunately the fireplace works, and as ever I have no shortage of unread novels on the shelves, not to mention plenty of writing to do, and even a juggling class to attend (this last in accordance with Celine’s dictum that a man who is not rich should at least look busy).
And I suspect that I will also spend much time pondering Sol’s missing sunspots, as well as an unsettling fact that David Deming brings up in *a recent American Thinker article*: “For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth's climate has been an ice age.”
Deming goes on to point out that “civilization as we know it is only possible in a warm interglacial climate. Short of a catastrophic asteroid impact, the greatest threat to the human race is the onset of another ice age.”
As I have said here before, I can envision a scenario in which we spend trillions of dollars preparing for global warming (a phrase that fairly cries out for quotation marks), only to freeze to death in the dark as our useless windmill generators and solar power collectors disappear beneath giant snowdrifts. And since it is the most absurd outcome possible, I am quite sure that it is the likeliest cause of our postmodern world’s downfall.
I like the kind of climate science practiced by my hero, Foghorn Leghorn:
"Coldest ah say COLDEST wintah in fifteen yeahs!!"
I like hot weather ... really hot weather. So, I'm all for global warming, except for the fact that it's not happening. But if it were happening, I'd be for it.
Polar bears can either adapt or die. Adapt ... or die .... adapt... die.... screw you guys, I'm going home!! (Cartman)
As for the rising ocean level, Mr. Gore, please stand right over there next to those breakers. Yep, that's perfect. Now don't move for the next hundred years, and I hope your predictions come true.
I've been hearing for a year or two that temperatures have been declining since 1998. I've heard Warmers say that GW is 'on hiatus' for 10 or 20 years, but that doesn't mean it's not real and there to kill us in the end.
In the past week or two, ever since Al Gore exclaimed it in an interview, I've seen several sources say that this decade was the warmest 'on record' and that 2009 will likely be the 5th warmest year ever.
How can 2009 and this decade be warmer than before when temps have been going down for 11 years??
Brian, I think the problem is that since the model the original IPCC research based their results on ("hockey stick" graph) did not predict the current cooling, even as a blip, it called into question (to put it mildly) the viability of the model itself. So, if they were honest, mature scientists, they would publicly admit the limitations of the model, learn from their errors, improve the model, and try, try again. But they covered it up for as long as they could in the hopes that either the cooling would reverse itself, or barring that, people would never discover or care about their errors.
Al Gore is wrong, the science is far from settled. But the actions of a few scientists does not automatically negate the work of the rest and there is still plenty of unrefuted evidence that much of the recent warming is antropogenic in origin.
The cooling of the past few years means we don't now have to act before we better understand the interactions between humans and climate change. We should take the time to continue to study the matter. But it is a mistake, in my opinion, to conclude from recent events that anthropogenic global warming is disproven.
If you listened to JB's show last night, the study was based on one tree in siberia. One tree. How scientific is that. Bottom line is AGW is just another vehicle for redistribution of wealth. What they can't do at gun point they will do by guilt and consensus. The thing is there is no consensus. These people should be ashamed of themselves, but there is none, and no apostasy forthcoming. They love marxism more than the truth.
For those who want to read the IPCC report themselves:
http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/
Not only do they provide access to the report and source information, they also provide the pre-release reviewers comments, both positive and negative.
Sorry, I didn't mean for the above to be a directed to anyone in particular, I clicked the wrong place.
But my question is - either it has been getting cooler for 11 years, or it hasn't. I'm hearing both. Which is correct?
The blunt truth is, nobody knows how to take the temperature of the Earth. Anybody who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Arrrgggh... I just typed in a long response and then lost it in a cyber wormhole. Summary: Read "Heaven and Earth" by Ian Plimer. It contains more information that anyone could ever need to know on this topic. Just based on what I've seen, the last 2 years (2008 and 2009) have been cooler.
CARBON DIOXIDE SUPPORTS LIFE ON THIS PLANET
For the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a health hazard leads the way for it to be considered a
pollutant like acid rain. And this is just crazy.
Is it possible that a better way to combat 'global warming' would be to purchase tropical rain forests in order to prevent deforestation -- and, thus, stop the decease in the level of oxygen that deforestation produces?
Separation of church and state seems to have worked out okay for this country. When will we institute separation of science and state?
Mankind loves following people that dress in white gowns and go about preaching myths.
The climate will be too hot for human habitation--when hell freezes over! That's the only sense I can make of it :)
One must be struck by the recent experience with all the economics "models" out there that failed to see the second greatest depression in our history coming. Those models are in many ways simliar to climate models or so it appears to me. collect as much data as you can, from various and variable sources, establish some mathematical relationships between them (all of which have variation that cannot be statistically accounted for). The real special sauce are the assumptions that are inserted that have little to no statistical support but reflect someone's theory of reality. Let the computer spit out the answer. Then, if answer isn't pleasing to the eye of the beholder, tweak the assumptions.
That's what Long Term Capital Management did essentially in reverse. They concluded the extreme event was so improbable they could act with certainty. The climate guys find an extreme and torture the data until it is a "certainty."
You can't imagine how frustrating it is for a scientist to be unable to reject the null hypothesis. Time wasted, ego bruised, peer scorn, grants disappear, nothing published, no acclaim at the next big conference, tenure endangered. The temptation to fool oneself is immense.
To Brian Cartright, who just wants to know what temperatures have been doing for the last 11 years, here is the satellite record -- click on the link below to see some nice graphs of global temperature for the past 20 years:
http://tinyurl.com/dbe3x8
The GISS/NASA temperature data shows warming, but these readings have been massaged. They take the raw thermometer readings and do all sorts of correction on them. They won't disclose how they made their corrections.
The other major global temperature data source is the recently hacked UK Hadley Climate Research Unit. They claim to have lost original temperature data, and they will not disclose the methods by which they "corrected" (I say massaged or fudged) them.
So who ya gonna believe? I'll take the satellite data, as that team does not deny warming generally, but they do question how we can be certain of the cause. Also, I believe their data and methods of analysis have been fully open for review by all scientists.
There was a huge temperature peak in 1998, caused I think by an unusual El Nino. So without that anomaly, was there warming since then? To me it looks to have flattened out since about 2002.
The warmists cannot explain the lack of warming. This is clear in the hacked CRU emails. Keven Trenberth, a lead author of the most recent IPCC report, wrote in an email in November, "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t."
Their climate models are crap. Dung. Doo doo. Excrement.
Eric, the tinyurl you gave was for some girl's MySpace page!!
Here's a graph from wunderground.com for my spot on the Earth
http://www.wunderground.com/NORMS/DisplayNORMS.asp?AirportCode=KJST&StateCode=PA&SafeCityName=Johnstown&Units=none&IATA=JST&lastyear=on&normals=on&records=on
Blue line is normal high/low for the date. Red line is actual high over tha past year (2009). I don't know if I can get it for other years.
During the summer months, the red line is clearly 10-15 degrees cooler than the historical average. From my checking of the daily highs on the same website over the last 5 years or so, this pattern has held. There was a three year stretch (2004 to 06 I believe) where our daily high never went over 82, for 3 years! When the historical average high was 90 during July.
Sorry about the URL goof. I must have copied the tinyurl wrong. Maybe you can cut/paste this: "wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/05/uah-global-temperature-anomaly-for-may-down-again-near-zero/"
That is the global satellite record.
There does seem to be a small upward global temperature trend for the last 150 years or so. But then, we are coming out of a mini ice age.
Sea levels are also rising at 3mm/year, too. But the past few years, there are signs this is leveling off too. check "sealevel.colorado.edu" Must be something wrong with me, but I just can't seem to get excited enough about an inch and a half sea level rise per decade. If beachfront property were cheap, I would buy it!
Now here's another interesting thing. A YouTube video titled "Global Warming US Cities Getting Warmer" try this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_G_-SdAN04
A sixth grader has done comparisons of temperatures in US cities versus small towns in the general vicinity of the cities, over the past 100 years. He used GISS/NASA temps available online. He found no warming trend in rural America. Only big cities. Oops. If CO2 caused warming, it would warm everyone everywhere, not just cities.
Climategate is the biggest scientific scandal in our lifetime.
I'm going to make a rather mundane observation here, but it's just intended to re-focus on what I believe to be the main issue. The problem isn't whether there's global warming, global cooling, or none of the above. The problem is why does there have to be such a polarization over the discussion? Why, when you Google Climategate, do you get links that either bash the warmists or bash the whistle-blowers? Where are the reasonable voices that say, let's take a few more years, go back to ground zero, start over with a clean slate, write down on a blackboard what we know, how we know it, etc. Kind of like House does when he's diagnosing a patient? Once a theory's ruled out it gets erased off the board. But if the piece of data used to rule it out is found to be in error, then the theory goes back up on the board.
Why can't we do this? What's the rush in arriving at an answer? As my plump old Jewish piano teacher used to say when I would play too fast (which was all the time): "Where's the fire?"
What started out as a dinner party called Unhealthy Hungarian Food Night turned into I Had Better Walk Home Instead Of Drive Night, and now I've got a mild case of frostbite, a condition I had heretofore believed that a just God reserved exclusively for our Northern oppressors.
Frostbite. In late autumn. In the mid-South.
Lou, that's what we want to do. Go back to the data. Make sure all i's are dotted, and t's are crossed. Then look at the analysis of that data, the algorithms used to correct in interpret the data.
It should all be out in the open. The fact that the head of Hadley CRU said he would destroy stuff rather than release it for public scrutiny should tell everyone something.
A simple scientific fraud is a curiosity, a bad thing, but then the researcher is discredited, and his theory stands or falls on subsequent investigation and exposure to sunlight, scientifically speaking.
When what looks like fraud is turned into a desperate scheme to bilk millions out of billions of dollars, is this not apt to cause polarization??? And why shouldn't people behind such a scheme be bashed? It is obvious from the emails that the climate "elite" knew they were suppressing contrary evidence, knew their own computer models weren't working, knew that if the data was not massaged to "hide the decline" it would look bad, and they knew that releasing their data and methods to other researchers would hurt their case. This was deliberate. Premeditated. Shouldn't those kinds of actions and the people who commit them be denigrated.
Run out of town on a rail, if you ask me.
There's no question about it, Eric. It's a given that the East Anglia scientists were involved in a coverup and that they should be punished. Their reputations are forever tarnished already, but I'll leave any further punishment up to their bosses and to the U.K. attorney general (or whatever he's called over there.)
That leaves the matter of how we move forward on the debate. IMO, we have to put blinders on our own political leanings one way or the other, and start over basically from scratch (but OK to use existing databases as long as they've been put through scrutiny to make sure that the East Anglia people didn't alter them.)
Lou, the Communists couldn't defeat Capitalism with tanks, nor with productivity. So now they rely on propaganda.
They argue that unless we go to 'Hope-en-hagen' and create a world body that will use command and control to allocate resources and trade between nations, we are all going to die.
Not only is capitalism unfair, not only has it failed, but it is killing the planet!
If they don't tax and regulate and create a world governing body now, right now, when they have window of opportunity, we might have time to think things through and discover their fraud.
As for the climate scientists...
Most professional and hobby life both involve collecting and processing data. It's what I love to do.
At work, we compile digital maps from aerial photography. First step is to look at the stereo image, and capture coded lines and points into a graphic database. That's what I am doing at this moment. From there the data goes through several automatic and manual editing processes before being delivered. We keep copies at each step. If something goes wrong, you can step back and redo.
When I'm not at work, I do quantitative analysis of baseball statistics. I'm supplying all the numbers for a subscription site which will have every major and minor league player. A major undertaking. I have software which downloads play by play every night from major league baseball's web site, then my routines do a couple hours of processing. Other than indexing, I never touch the original files. If I make a mistak,e or change my mind on how to do something, I can rerun the queries on the original data, starting from scratch.
There have been times over the years when I have lost original data. The boss or the client is waiting for the results. You frakking panic. Cold sweat. You really don't want people to know that it happened. I reckon the East Anglia folks then resorted to cover it up.
And once you've publicly rolled out a product, start getting millions of dollars of funding, primarily by creating public fear...what do yuo do when you find out you were wrong? Sorry, my bad. Not only might you lose funding, you might have problems finding you next job. Again, time for the coverup.
Just keep pretending nothing's wrong, and maybe no one will find out. Meanwhile, a few trillion tax dollars later...
That sounds about right. Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and all that.
Ken, I believe there are several groups of villians at work here. I just described my take on the scientists.
I believe Obama and most of his advisors fall into the 'Green is the new Red' crowd. They seriously do not believe in capitalism and wish to see it replaced. Global Warming, true or not, is a vehicle for them to achieve their goal.
And then there are the Al Gore's and General Electric's of the world. Let people believe something is going to happen, and they are ready to sell you the solution. GE can manufacture the 'green' products that will make it a profit. Gore is similarly behind companies that have made him tens if not hundreds of million of dollars already. If there is no AGW, where would Gore ever find a job?
Veritas vos liberabit.
I've made some pretty big goofs in my career. I think maybe 3 or 4 times numbers have gone out that shouldn't have. I remember running to the post office one time at 5 PM on a Friday and begging a postal employee who allowed me to pull an outgoing envelope out of the mail because it was addressed to one of our most important clients and the letter started with Dear Ms. Smith (it was a man.) But sometimes it goes out anyway. Sometimes the client does not notice it but you do.
In all cases when a mistake is made, you have to admit it. You have to come clean early on. That's such an important rule in not only professional life but human relations that it cannot be overstated. Come clean AS SOON AS you find out you've goofed. It's better to look like a fool now and lose credibility than to lie awake at night wondering when the mistake's going to come to light.
When I get up at 4 AM to drain a vein my mind is hazy but it's clear of any lies, at least, and I think about the salient events in my life at that moment and any lies are always revealed to me, especially ones I'm telling myself.
Unfortunately, at the moment the only thing that's playing through my mind at 4AM these days is the Senate clerk calling "Mr. Akaka" as she starts the roll call. Because C-Span2 mutes the mikes after she says that, the pattern that's repeated a dozen times a day is that the Senate President pro-tem says "The clerk will call the roll", the clerk says, "Mr. Akaka", and then all is quiet. This is getting way down into my spinal column after so much repetition : Mr. Akaka .... Mr. Akaka .... Mr. Akaka ...... It's a completely worthless piece of information, but Mr. Akaka is the junior senator from Hawaii and the only time you ever hear his name is when the clerk calls the roll, him being in the poll position.
Just some random thoughts...
"Green is the new red." My thought is that Green is the new Swastika.
Lou: "IMO, we have to put blinders on our own political leanings one way or the other, and start over basically from scratch..." True, but the Goddard/NASA people are balking at freedom of information requests for data/methods also. We have our own little East Anglia here in USA. I don't think they "lost" all the raw data, at least I'm not aware of it. So at least we have a scratch to start from. I think NASA also will destroy their algorithms before they let anyone outside the climate clique view them. Maybe that's too cynical.
I'm depressed that not a single voice in the media I know can do science reporting as simple and compelling as the YouTube video from the sixth grader and his dad that I mentioned earlier. www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_G_-SdAN04 The newspapers and network news in this country deserves to wither. They can't even ask simple, logical questions anymore, or do in-depth fact checking. They simply regurgitate talking points from supposed "experts" on opposite sides of an issue. When they get a warmist or a skeptic on, they can't even conceive of the questions to ask that could expose the real weaknesses in their arguments. *sigh*
I may be further along in the jaded curve than you, Eric, because I gave up on the MSM a while back, especially the newspapers. Jim Rome has it about right when he refers to the newspapers as "the fishwrap" although it's getting so bad they would taint the taste of the fish. Maybe better to line hamster or gerbil cages with at this point.
What's more disturbing to me than the MSM is the ease with which the current crop of college students and young adults do not challenge the consensus. My daughter is a bio major at CMU and she not only accepts AGW, but she refuses to even read any of the books or links I suggest to her that would cause her to challenge those beliefs. In fact, she heads the other way when I start talking about it. My son, who is older and a bit more of a gladhander, will say, "Sure, Dad, you've convinced me that it's all a hoax, now how about that $50 I need?" Either way, they are both intelligent young adults, but don't really give a crap about digging in to this. In a way, I don't blame them, in the sense that if they were to form their own opinions on the matter, their peers would reject them. I went through some of this in college but the way I dealt with it was I had about 4 or 5 different groups of friends, some of which could not stand the others, and would play the scientist in one group, the sensitive artist in another, the politically incorrect redneck in a third (probably my favorite group!) etc. Peer group pressure is bad, mmmmkay.
I don't think NASA would destroy data or do anything to participate in the coverup. They at least deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt since they've never done anything (to my knowledge) to cast suspicion on their integrity. BTW, it makes interesting reading to take a look at Dick Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster (he was the one who famously dropped a piece of rubber in icewater to demonstrate vividly what happened to the O-rings.) His description of NASA is illuminating. They were under a lot of political pressure, they would sometimes cut corners to keep things on schedule, but Feynman also described the NASA scientists as being open-minded and interested in getting at the truth of what happened. That was 20 years ago but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that things haven't changed much.
I didn't mean to give the impression that I think it's going to be an easy thing to accomplish, starting over with a clean slate. But it's what must be done.