The climate conference cited as the most important, in Paris, COP21, is entering its dire 2nd - & final - week, in which, if you believe the pundits, the fate of the world is decided. At the same time as the conference two ads now openly threatening the German audience with destruction if they don't come 'round have appeared in German cinemas. (And many ads all over the Western world in different languages, voiced by well-known folk.)

The first one, voiced by a German actor known for his strong activism, is the more threatening of the two. At the end, the Ocean says to us, the viewers: "I once covered the whole of the earth's surface. I CAN DO IT AGAIN!" And then the mission statement of ad owners, Conservation International, appears in big letters, beginning with: Nature doesn't need us...

A fascist argumentative structure always puts a section of human beings down as not having earned the right to life. In this case it's i.a. all of us "climate change deniers"^. The ad is implying that it's our final chance to come over to the winning side. Otherwise Nature will just shrug us off and let us die.

The structure mentioned also always has a fake argument at its base to justify the extreme-exclusion measures. Is the "climate change"** argument fake?

It's hard to say, because the science is so wishy-washy in public debate. Most "fact" sheets end up referring to complex statistical approximations (for the past) and complex computer models (for the future), that laymen have more than a hard time to fathom. The word "complex" nowadays implies exactly this obscurity. Which is why the side argument is always brought by the pro camp, that the vast majority of climate scientists (~98%) agree with the predictive findings. But a majority of scientists have been wrong before (e.g. when initially stamping General Relativity as bogus after Einstein first published it, almost exactly a century ago).

As sceptical laymen, we can only hold on to phenomenological criticism: The theory is mostly a prediction, that will only be proved in decades to come; such predictions have a very bad track record, especially ones pertaining to climate. Also, the initial models predicted a world temperature trend that has been way off compared to measurements in the last decade or so; those models have probably been adjusted now. And: One fearsome detail in the apocalyptic prediction was quietly dropped years ago because it turned out to be an exaggeration of too little data - the freezing over of the Northern hemisphere due to the stoppage of the North Atlantic Current (recall that Emmerich movie based on this?). "Too little data" may be the general problem of the theory if you look at the object subject to experiment here - the entire surface and aquasphere of the planet.

As unsure as I am about this fearsome theory - and its partly fear-mongering proponents - I have the feeling the whole theory may be equally uncertain. And that what we're seeing - i.a. in cinemas - is a now-grown-large hype snowball that has been gathering momentum for more than 10 years.

Beware an argument "too big to fail"! It always seems very hip and important, but it tends to divide humans into those who get it, and those who don't - who thus threaten the lives of the assumed majority by their "denial".