What's better for a book and its author: good reviews or a threat of a boycott of the publisher?
Today I received an email from one Gavin Bower of Quartet Books of London, a publisher with a respectable history of daring to handle works that no one else was willing to touch. The Joy of Sex in 1973, for example. I've never heard from Bower or Quartet before, but for some reason I'm on their media contact list. The subject: a blog post from Quartet's publisher decrying an alleged "orchestrated boycott" from environmental fundamentalists upset that Quartet has published climate change pseudoskeptic Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth: Global Warming - The Missing Science.
You don't say.
I can't find any reference on the Internet to a boycott, orchestrated or ad hoc, of Quartet Books for any reason, let alone the publishing of Plimer's widely discredited attempt to argue the entire climatology community doesn't understand the basics of its own science. Which makes me wonder if the book's disappointing sales and dismal reviews could have something to do with all this fuss about an alleged campaign against the publisher.
To be fair, the book has received a fair bit of attention, and is reportedly responsible for convincing Australia's Opposition Leader and the CEO of Whole Foods that anthropogenic global warming is a hoax. But most of the attention has not been, shall we say, complimentary. Tim "Deltoid" Lambert found the time to debunk some the myriad errors, misrepresentations and falsehoods in the book, and Ian Enting has produced a 46-page PDF that goes into even more detail along the same lines.
No one is talking about an organized boycott, though. So could it be that Quartet publisher Naim Attallah invented the threat, or at least grossly exaggerated off-hand suggestions from anonymous blog commenters? After all, if there's any publisher who knows the value of boycotts and their usefulness in attracting coverage and sales, it would be Quartet. The history page of the company's website talks of "Groundbreaking books, which alarmed other publishing houses" and Attallah begins a defence of his decision to publish Heaven and Earth with
From its beginnings, Quartet saw itself as publishing voices of dissent and radical opinions, believing that these needed to be heard as part of the ongoing democratic debate.
He continues:
I would therefore be betraying the principles on which Quartet was founded if I refrained from publishing a book because it represented a minority or alternative view.
True. But neither would you be betraying the principles on which Quartet was founded if you refrained from publishing a book after performing a fact-check and found the work woefully shy of anything approaching factual.
Wait a minute. Am I playing into Attallah's hands by even mentioning this? Maybe, but does that mean that anyone who brings up a possible boycott of Whole Foods because CEO John Mackey is also a climate change denier is just playing into his hands, too?
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You could always invite them here to defend themselves, Mwahahaha.
Personally I think a boycott would be unnecessary, as long as enough people know that this isnt a serious science publishing company. By all means publish fiction or non-mainstream stuff, just don't pretend it has anything to do with science.
Well I have heard of people starting to boycott whole states if that sta'e senator or congressman voted for the healthcare bill. It is not widely popular, but it catching on.
The way it works is conservative refuse to vacation in that state or purchase something that is produced in that state therefore costing the state money by making them lose tax revenues. If it catches on with thousands it could have an effect.
I got that too! I just ignored it, didn't even read it..."Oh, Plimer...."
Jerry, surely the logical extension of that is that people opposed to health care boycott the US, since the US President pushed the bill. I hear that anti-communist South American dictatorships are lovely this time of year.
It's all part of a big cognitive dissonance game the global warming contrarians have to play in the face of the evidence and the broad consensus on anthropogenic global warming. They can't accept that they are wrong, so they resort to conspiracy theories to explain why everyone rejects their shoddy arguments. The stolen emails are part of that psychological adaptation. It's like reading stuff about NASA conspiracies from people who think the moon landing was faked.
As a geologist I am very comfortable with the multiple working hypothesis - I would like someone to start examining the other ideas out there. The Danes have been on the case for a long while, studying the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be involved in warming? The first paper to read is Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science; 1991) If you can find the entire issue in the reference library, you will see the editorâs comment referred to this paper as hitting the ball into the anthropogenic court. The causation is under scientific review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. The correlation broke down when Pinatubo erupted in 1991; my tomatoes did not ripen that summer either. Is this the exception that proves the rule?
The important correlation between warming and cooling is the sunspot peak frequency, not the actual number of spots. However, we all realize correlation is not causation. Sunspot peak frequency proxies for the rise and fall of the sunâs magnetic field. Cosmic radiation is currently at its highest ever measured because the sun and earthâs magnetic shields are down; climate is changing. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the carbon economy. Maybe not evil; just wrong.
The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails.
Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center has experiments scheduled for the Hadron collider to test his basement experiment. Elevated solar flux (> 10 protons per cc) appears to cause fog in the Great Lakes and clouds too. The hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows: quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate. An active sun has an enhanced magnetic field that induces Earthâs geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.
That is how the bulk of climate change likely works, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, all the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, as they have been for this century, all the planets cool.
Many answers yield many new questions: the change in cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, warming and attendant humidity have allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. We can likely kick much of the carbon economy sometime late the twenty-first century, but we must not rush to judgement for the wrong reason. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Nothing unusual is going on except for the Orwellian politics. In other words, it is not the heat; it is the humidity.
@Francis T. Manns:
As a geologist, please provide a rebuttal to this lecture:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
Enjoy especially the reference to the Laschamp excursion, where GCRs fell onto earth in screaming numbers. How did the earth's climate react? It reacted to those GCRs by not changing...
Hi Francis T. Manns,
I'm a geologist, too. Next time you have a tooth-ache, pay me a visit. I can help you out.
Mr. Hrynyshyn, please now tell us that Mojab Latif has no clue whatsoever. Tell us that he is a shill for the oil companies. Tell us that he didn't have a hand-picked buddy rubber-stamp I mean peer review and important data with manually adjusted "data". Please tell us that our religion is in tact. Please Mr. Hrynyshyn. Please tell us you still believe. That you will always believe. The congregation of the church of global warming really needs to hear a good sermon about now.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
No, but I will tell you to read this. -- jh
http://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/back-to-global-warming/