I've missed about three months' worth of blog entries on my normal schedule, so here are as many short ones to bring me up to May...

Everybody is talking about the certainty of catastrophic climate change - "if we don't do something" - so I'd like to point out how certain a scientific hypothesis is, is dependent on its method of proof. Something rarely if ever discussed in the media.

To make it simple I propose everyone use a pyramid schema for the strength of a scientific theory, similar to the one that used to be printed on cereal boxes for nutritional value, except upside down:

• The broad top of the pyramid is stuff that has been proven, & peer-reviewed okay by being able to repeat the procedure/experiment & ending up with the same results over 95% of the time. This is the "A grade" most hypotheses should aspire to (but some don't bother).
• The middle section is in two parts: The first group is all matured empirical science - i.e. data gets collected, but no real axiomatic theory is visible at first. Over time (many decades as a rule) some structure is discerned, piece by piece, and the empirical data plus a few straight-forward theses of how they came to be has some predictive power. The theory of evolution is part of this group. -- The second similar group here seems to me to be anything that "works like magic": Think of a clever mechanic fixing something in a troublesome engine, and not sure why it works. It can be repeated by any number of people, i.e. is highly predictive, but there is no good explanation for it. Some mathematical theorems are like that (e.g. Fermat's last theorem for the longest time, until recently).
• The tiny tip on which the pyramid is balancing consists of hypotheses that apply to complex systems, for which a straight-forward model (usually based on a few equations) does not suffice to explain all past data. This is the "theorem-with-little-or-no-proof" category. As a rule the theory predicts some behaviour of the target system correctly in time and space, but often way below the usual 95% mark. Diagnoses of psychological aberrations are examples of this kind of science.

So, if we call them "big top", "medium I" & "medium II", and "little foot", whch one of these would you say is the one for the current climate change theory?

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We Germans don't allow ourselves to feel pride for our country most of the time, most of us. One of the many consequences of the murder spree of a certain nationalist government eight decades ago (and the mayhem they generally caused in the decade that followed).

I don't fit that mold too well because I grew up in Africa, where I often had to defend my being German in an English-speaking environment. So I tend to automatically look for things I can be a little German-proud of.

And one thing I've noticed in recent years, that I missed in the closing years of the 20th century: There are a lot more foreign-looking women passing by on the streets of major German cities, away from tracks beaten by tourists, and about a third of them are smiling. Naturally, I particular take note of African women.

They may be doing something with their mobile phone, may be playing with their children on the U-Bahn, or just talking to someone in the supermarket.

And the very fact that they are there means Germany is in a phase where female foreigners tend to come here more often than in the more dire times when you had to fight hard to be able to remain in Germany if you'd arrived a short time ago. Which meant mainly men would try...

Germany is slowly opening up. Instead of always saying loudly for all to hear that we are not an immigration country ("Einwanderungsland") there now is actually a rumour that we may have our first ever immigration law Real Soon Now. (Wow!)

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Whenever someone - usually of younger age - is showing me some new app that makes something that used to be done in a more roundabout, perhaps entirely analogue, way till now, "so much easier", I wonder if they - and many, many others almost everywhere - don't see that apparent ease-of-access often has a highly deleterious effect on life diversity.

Two examples: My favourite video store has thousands of DVDs of feature & documentary films and series. Three people service my requests behind the counter, and all of them know their stock pretty well, and, in addition, have gotten to know my tastes pretty well over the years, too. The rapport is such that, if I say I don't know what I want to take with me at a given visit, within seconds, I will have something in hand they recommend, that I never saw before. -- This great, personalised and huge-spectrum service is in jeopardy of going out of business soon, due to developments like Netflix and direct DVD rental via the WWW. The latter are as a rule much less personalised, and way less diverse (i.e. the selection of films/series offered is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude smaller); and, in any case, I don't get to move my bod (exercise muscles) and talk with real people (exercise brain, social skills department) most of the time.

Second case: A neat small travel agency, run by a usually bright-spirited woman a few years older than me, used to sell me train and plane tickets a few years ago, as well as the one or other package holiday. Then the German Rail upped the "license fee" such agencies had to pay if rail trips were ticketed by them, rather than the big customer care units in train stations, or the company web site. This meant the nice lady's main branch of business - selling train tickets to older folk - basically collapsed, and she went out of business soon after that. Why do I miss her? Because whenever something went wrong on the many trips I went on, all over the world, I knew I could always call her as a last resort and be sure she would have my back, even from far away Germany, eventually getting me home. No digital system or German Rail "customer care" will develop that level of loyalty. Ever.

So, my advice to those seekers for hand-held "ease" is: Pay attention to who has the power & the social back-bone to supply you with whatever gives your life diversity, and do all you can to protect those people and allow them to continue doing the good work they're doing - for lots of people. As a rule without any major material profits on their side.

Because you can be sure that some piece of software will not be able to develop that kind of diversity & loyalty to you, for a long time to come. And even if it could, what would be the profit for the producer of that software? She/He will always "optimise" their product to maximise the cash flow from you to them. So the software will be loyal to them first, second and third. (And in terms of loss of diversity, refer to "Netflix" in the first case's paragraph, above...)

Some apps can be "sinks", i.e. they suck up diversity and true care of you, the user, while you're being dazzled by the user interface. Beware such sinks, and use trajectories that get you out if you're already sunken in, or help you steer clear altogether.

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".

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.