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In mid-October there was a freak snowstorm in our neck of the woods -- must be global warming. All the leaves were still on the trees and the several inches of heavy wet snow brought down limbs all over the place. On the way down the limbs mashed the roofs of cars, the roofs of houses and brought down power lines. No computers to do the work as typewriters, accountants, composing machines and storage cabinets. We had a full day without heat (the furnace was AWOL) and a vacation.

The banks, of course, closed but fortunately the local bar was open for business. All those damn fool candles on the tables finally paid their way, the fireplaces with logs also became more than decorations, and the stoves for cooking use propane. The only problem was no ice for the drinks, but that didn't matter much. After three warm martinis who cares about ice?

But it did get me thinking about how computers have changed our world while we weren't looking. Take the obvious computer stuff. The internet is used in place of both a dictionary and an encyclopedia. No one seems to care that the information on the net is not edited or verified. What's this doing to spelling and general knowledge? And have you noticed that no one removes anything from the net and that there are few if any dates on the material? Is it still true? Some answers change with time like who's your State Senator and your local fire chief. But some information is true forever like who's your representative in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives.

Then there are the computers we don't think about much except at the turn of a millenium when the whole world comes to a screeching halt like it did on January 1, 2000.

They're used to calculate things like how the atmosphere works and to predict global warming. Garbage in, gospel out. The carbon dioxide in the air has changed about 12% due to our cutting down trees in the Amazon and burning gasoline in our cars. A change of about 3% in the absolute temperature would be a catastrophe. But has there been enough change in greenhouse gas to affect global warming?

A change of a few percent in the earth's albedo would reflect the energy of the sun, hotter or colder. Let's suppose that you had to put the proper amount of cloud cover and its change into a climatic computer model. Have you ever looked at a satellite photo of the cloud cover on your local weather channel? My guess is that no one can figure its amount or density, so the energy reflected by clouds over the lighted hemisphere is to within 20%. They undoubtedly affect the global temperature more than the greenhouse gases. Want to find a culprit changing the global temperature due to human activity? Check out contrails in the sky. They cause a change in cloud cover of at least 2%.

It's easy to measure temperature compared to other factors in these climate models, but even that is arguable. NASA data on global temperature measured from satellites has been going down for the last three years while the CO2, particularly in China and India, has been increasing at an alarming rate.

There's also no doubt that global cooling has been on earth since the end of the last ice age. NASA's been measuring the global temperature of Mars and Jupiter for decades and it's been rising. Amazing, isn't it, how the carbon dioxide from a car on the freeway in Pasadena can alter the climate on Jupiter.