So let's end it.

About two weeks ago I started a thread in the German SF forum I visit daily, touting the title that is behind almost every headline in the nature/science sections of the news these days: The planet is heating up and we're all to blame! Well, on and off it's been a "heated" discussion with several folks there, which tends to go emotional in the beginning, to then either end in despisal of my extreme views or illogical arguments, or in quiescent semi-agreement that it is a true complex, hard to disentangle. Then silence.

What I'm missing here and in the "discussion" at large is someone thumping me and the occasional other doubter virtually on the soap-box-elevated speaker's shoulder, and crying heartily, "Good job for trying to illuminate the other side!" It is meant to be a scientific "debate", after all; and science supposedly thrives on founded opposition to its theories.

Why all the "d" words in quotes? Well, if you look and hear around, everyone agrees it's too late to "d" the thing anyway. Because we're already "c'ing" it...

All the media, and naturally all "with it" politicians, are repeating what's apparently the consensus among scientists: That we are on the brink of sudden climate change, of lots of ice condensing into water, urbanised coasts and whole islands disappearing, millions succumbing in the throes of Mother Earth's shuddering at the climb of several degrees in "her" average annual temperature in 90 (!) years or so.

But there is no consensus; some scientists disagree and that means that sleepy dragon Science is still kicking in a dream of its old objective hey-day high flights, and that we do not have that "c" word. The data is minimal, the obvious not necessarily true. (Isn't that obvious? E.g. only a fraction of all glaciers on the planet have actually been measured, when people talk of the majority melting - but how was this fraction selected, and is that a statistically representative sample?) And then we have computer models, lots of them, generating beautifully graphic, detailed future scenarios. Whatever happened to precision following accuracy? I.e., if computed models weren't able to predict our present levels of atmospheric gases, temperature and rain in the past, why should they be more accurate now predicting the near future? Yes, in just fifteen years, Al Gore tells us in An Unpleasant Truth, it'll all be over, if we continue doing nothing, all scientists and all models agree.

Well, perhaps by now, bloody-nosed, I, too, agree: We will be to blame in 15 years. If we do nothing. If we let this global computer game distract us from the really big problems - economic turmoil, poverty growing here and there "elsewhere", populistic extremism by men in too much power - we need to attack. Real soon now. So I agree with Crichton in his appendix to his badly disguised essay-as-a-novel State of Fear: Put the mouse aside, and go outside and meet the big bad breathing ice bear of worldly strife in the everyday. The chance to work for, to build, a respectable existence.

The balancing of wealth vs. a life on a pittance, of health vs. disease, infection and starvation, of a chance for personal and communal happiness.

And, perhaps, in fifteen years the weather will happen to be clement enough to see the global village handling global weather as another of the normal challenges of Life on Earth. And more of us simply making do.