And how much do you want to bet that, if somehow there is a huge effort made by the world to greatly reduce human impact on climate change, and global warming slows, that those people will say "See! There was nothing to worry about all along, it was just a lot of hype!"

Not that I think that the huge effort will be made in time, I'm pretty pessimistic about people and governments being willing to give up "progress" and creature comforts. They will be taken away, though.

The possible negative impacts of the Y2K situation were clear-cut, the underlying cause easy to understand (even though it was difficult to assess the full exent of the problem), and so business and government, ever mindful of the bottom line, especially the current year's bottom line, took the extensive proactive measures you mentioned.

The medial technology industry, perhaps because it was used to dealing with human life span related dates, didn't have too many Y2K problems, though I was involved in a number of upgrades to equipment that would have failed otherwise... none in my area catastrophic. I spent New Year's Eve 1999 with my family playing card games in my lab/office just in case there were any problems.