Top ten climate change selections on Amazon (US site) today:- denialist (#120 in sales)
- economist quasi-denialist (#834)
- denialist turned unstoppablist (#1180)
- competent (#6226)
- scientist (#8979 )
- denialist
- alarmist
- denialist
- not very competent
- unstoppablist
5 denialists/unstoppablists plus Lomborg in the top ten; nothing remotely sensible in the top three. Ranking vs sales is roughly logarithmic base 10 so Spencer is selling ten to a hundred times as many books as Broecker.
I wonder if there are people who have denialist book collections, though. I figure one global warming book every five years or so is good enough for most people who don't thrive on conspiracies. Interesting. If you buy only one global warming book every five years your most recent one should probably be Field Notes from a Catastrophe (#9504) by Elizabeth Kolbert, which for some reason didn't show up on the top ten list.
I beg to differ, but Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the better examples of a complete nut case that I've ever read. She makes even the nutty Jean Bahr seem almost reasonable!
ReplyDeleteWould you care to be specific?
ReplyDeleteI think Kolbert fairly represents the mood in the various scientific communities that she talks to. What is nuts about that?
(I don't know who Jean Bahr is.)
Aha, Dr Barr is the chair of the geology department at U W Madison.
ReplyDeleteSurely a fringe case, no doubt.
Michael, I happen to have known Jean Bahr for nearly 20 years, and I am not alone in regarding her as a nut case.
ReplyDeleteInteresting.
ReplyDeleteHow does she get to be chair then? Presumably most of the geologists at UW don't think she has any greatly debilitating flaws.
(I suppose telling some undergrads about the CO2 problem twenty years ago might have seemed a bit implausible, but guess what...)
Seems we may have overlapped at UW. I showed up nearly twenty years ago, myself. There was plenty of concern next door at the meteorology department already.