Quotulatiousness

January 13, 2012

Continuators: heroes or villains?

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

“What’s a continuator?” I pretend to hear you ask. Those are the folks who pick up the fallen pen of other (almost always greater) authors to write endings for unfinished works:

There’s a long list of great authors who have left work unfinished, often because of illness or death. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, to name but a few. An industry has grown up around them, of so-called “continuators” — writers eager to finish the stories that they began.

There have been a number of continuations of Austen’s Sanditon, including efforts by Juliette Shapiro and Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. Austen had only got 11 chapters in when she stopped, enough to establish the characters, but leaving the continuators plenty of room for manoeuvre.

But why would a writer choose to finish the work of another author, rather than create original work? Surely that leads to pastiche?

It’s dangerous territory, suggests Prof John Mullan, who is currently writing a book on Austen. “What we expect when we read the work of Austen, or Dickens, or Laurence Sterne, is a particular voice, and that’s terribly difficult to bring off.”

It’s a risky strategy for an author, but perhaps it speaks to a profound need in all of us. The literary critic Frank Kermode wrote in his book Sense of an Ending about our deep-rooted need to be rewarded with conclusions.

John Sutherland, emeritus professor at University College London, agrees. “Kermode famously observed that when we hear a clock go tick tick tick, what we hear is tick tock tick tock, because we like beginnings and endings. We’re hardwired, like lemmings going over a cliff.”

My experiences with continuators has been quite mixed. I’ve never been able to read anything by Spider Robinson since he “finished” a novel from Robert A. Heinlein’s very early period. I hated it so much that it actually diminished my admiration for Heinlein’s entire body of work (I eventually recovered). On the other hand, I quite enjoyed Great King’s War which was a sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Kalvan of Otherwhen. John F. Carr and Roland J. Green did an excellent job of writing in the same voice as Piper and took his characters in believable directions.

Do you write fan fiction? You might want to check for plagiarists re-using your work

Filed under: Books, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:49

Plagiarism is a problem, but how do you react when someone takes your (erotic) fan fiction work without permission and packages and re-sells it?

After checking the author page for Maria Cruz, who that day had the top-selling erotica book in Amazon’s U.K. Kindle store, she counted 40 erotica ebook titles, including Sister Pretty Little Mouth, My Step Mom and Me, Wicked Desires Steamy Stories and Domenating [sic] Her, plus one called Dracula’s Amazing Adventure. Most erotica authors stay within the genre, so Sharazade was surprised Cruz had ventured into horror. Amazon lets customers click inside a book for a sample of text and Sharazade was impressed with how literate it was. She extracted a sentence fragment, googled it, and found that Cruz had copy and pasted the text from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Curious, Sharazade keyed in phrases from other Cruz ebooks and discovered that every book she checked was stolen.

[. . .]

It turns out Cruz isn’t the only self-published plagiarist. Amazon is rife with fake authors selling erotica ripped word-for-word from stories posted on Literotica, a popular and free erotic fiction site that according to Quantcast attracts more than 4.5 million users a month, as well as from other free online story troves. As recently as early January, Robin Scott had 31 books in the Kindle store, and a down-and-dirty textual analysis revealed that each one was plagiarized. Rachel M. Haven, a purveyor of incest, group sex, and cheating bride stories, was selling 11 pilfered tales from a variety of story sites. Eve Welliver had eight titles in the Kindle store copied from Literotica and elsewhere, and she had even thought to plagiarize some five-star reviews. Luke Ethan’s author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual, and it doesn’t appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1. 



January 8, 2012

The Joyce Estate provides useful ammunition to those opposed to longer copyright terms

Filed under: Books, Economics, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:42

The works of James Joyce have finally (re-)entered the public domain:

On the last day of 2011, the 70th anniversary year of his death, James Joyce’s work finally passed out of copyright. It was the dawn of a new age for Joyce scholars, publishers and biographers who are now free to quote or publish him without the permission of the ferociously prohibitive Joyce estate.

Over the past 20 years the right to quote from or publish Joyce’s work has been a matter of increasingly heated debate. The estate’s most vocal trustee, Stephen Joyce, the author’s grandson, earned himself the reputation as the most intractable defender of any copyright in modern times. His truculence (often verbal and colourful) towards those wishing to quote or publish his grandfather’s words dated from the mid-1970s, when biographer Richard Ellmann published some of Joyce’s “pornographic” letters to his wife Nora and some suggestive ones to a clandestine lover in Zurich. On becoming a trustee, Stephen was determined to prevent any further such revelations.

He outraged a meeting of Joyce scholars in Venice in 1988 by announcing that he had destroyed around a thousand letters to Joyce from his troubled daughter Lucia, as well as some to her from Samuel Beckett, the love of her young life. The following year he forced Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. However, in 1991, the 50th anniversary of his death, Joyce’s copyright lapsed and for a time he could be quoted freely without permission. But in 1995 copyright in Europe was extended to 70 years, so the rights reverted to the estate.

[. . .]

The intention of the literary guardian is often not just to protect the reputation and prestige of an individual or family but also to safeguard the integrity of a work against experimentation, revision or trivialisation. Samuel Beckett, for example, refused to allow women to take the leading roles in Waiting for Godot, an indignant Orwell stopped his publisher publicising Nineteen Eighty-Four as a romantic thriller and the Joyce estate refused Kate Bush permission to include the final, seductive words of Molly Bloom from Ulysses in a song.

But there is also a certain power and prestige in being the literary executor of a famous writer. People pay heed to one’s words, come cap-in-hand to one’s door with requests, and the trustee of manuscripts is free to grant or deny favours with a lordly nod or dismissive gesture. It is a power jealously guarded and sometimes remorselessly implemented.

The complete knowledge fallacy

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Media, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:29

Another thumb-sucker about how we’re been overwhelmed with data and it’s all Google’s fault (well, not really):

Today, any young reader of JK Rowling’s The Philosopher’s Stone would be bound to ask, turning the pages with bated-breath expectation as Harry Potter comes close to being discovered in the out-of-bounds section of the library: “Why didn’t he just Google it?”

As so often, however, our sense of living in an age which is particularly vulnerable to being overwhelmed by too much information turns out to be misplaced.

Even before the invention of the printing press — when the distribution of information depended upon teams of scribes working with pen and ink in monastery libraries — the fear of too much to know, too much material too widely and swiftly disseminated, was already threatening to overwhelm our orderly sense of understanding.

Once books proliferated in printed form from the 16th Century onwards — “too many books, too little time” was the complaint of scholars like Erasmus and Descartes. Knowledge-gatherers scrambled to develop ever more-complicated ways of assembling, organising and distributing knowledge drawn from as wide as possible a range of erudite and unfamiliar sources for easy retrieval.

[. . .]

Of course I am labouring the point here to remind us that there has never been a time when mastering the sum of human knowledge has not been felt to be an impossible task. And historically there was the additional fear that the precious store of knowledge accumulating as the world grew in wisdom might be lost by natural or man-made disaster. Early modern compilers of information feared that without care for its safekeeping, information might run through their fingers like sand, lost forever.

A strong theme in the surprisingly large early modern literature bewailing the effect of too many books is not just worry at not being able to keep hold of everything a person is required to know, but this fear of loss. To 15th and 16th Century scholars, the period following antiquity — the so-called “dark ages” — had almost succeeded in obliterating classical learning forever. In the 17th Century, Europe-wide wars, civil wars and unrest had resulted in the destruction of entire archives of precious administrative documents.

Hence the potent theme of knowledge rescued from near-oblivion, which runs through early modern discussions of how to store and retrieve information reliably.

January 6, 2012

Michael Geist: help save Canada’s liberal public domain rules

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:56

Canada’s standards for when works enter the public domain are more liberal than those in the US and Europe (that is, we provide shorter — but still generous — periods of copyright protection). Michael Geist says that these standards may be at risk soon:

Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

In an interesting coincidence, the Canadian government filed notice of a public consultation on December 31, 2011 on the possible Canadian entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, trade talks that could result in an extension in the term of copyright that would mean nothing new would enter the Canadian public domain until 2032 or beyond. The TPP covers a wide range of issues, but its intellectual property rules as contemplated by leaked U.S. drafts would extend the term of copyright, require even stricter digital lock rules, restrict trade in parallel imports, and increase various infringement penalties. As I noted last month, if Canada were to ratify the TPP, it would require another copyright bill to undo much of what the government is about to enact with Bill C-11.

December 26, 2011

The Tough Guide to Fantasy Cities

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:20

Charles Stross linked to this guide, suggesting that it is worth reading:

Introduction
If you are not attracted by the promise of an extended trek over rough terrain, with little access to hot showers or decent restaurants, the classic Tour of Fantasyland is probably not for you.

That is why the Management now offers separate Fantasy City Tours, available to tour groups as well as single individuals. The cities on offer have been carefully selected: they are relatively modern, if not downright futuristic, and offer seasoned travellers the comforts they have come to expect. You will not encounter any rustic taverns, bards, or bowls of stew on these tours! Instead, expect nightclubs, rock singers, and lots of gourmet coffee.

In the Toughpick section, you will find details on the people, places and things you are likely to encounter in your chosen Fantasy City. Please note that while you will not encounter all of them, you will inevitably encounter some of them before the conclusion of your Tour, and it is best to be prepared.

As always, we have carefully marked certain words as Official Management Terms. You are advised to commit these to memory, as you will certainly encounter them everywhere in your Tour.

[. . .]

Civic Pride
When you visit a Tainted City, you will likely encounter a large variety of refugees, wanderers, outlaws, and criminals. Occasionally, if you are very lucky, you may even meet some honest Workers.

Given the nightmarish and unhealthy environment, you may be tempted to ask a few of these people why they choose to stay in a city that is chock-full of Zombies or Mysterious Blight. Do not bother. They will not be able to produce a reason, at least not one that makes sense to you; you may recall the ancient anecdote about the man who cleaned up after the elephants in the circus.

Demons
Demons are often almost indistinguishable from mere humans. This goes especially for male demons, who for some reason greatly outnumber female demons in Undead Cities.

Watch out for strange eyes (ebony OMT, fathomless OMT, unearthly blue OMT), a cruel mouth, and a general tendency towards boorish sarcasm. Admittedly nine tenths of the men you are likely to meet in Undead Cities will fit this description, so it does not really narrow things down much.

[. . .]

Goggles
They do nothing. However, they look cool. In a Steam-driven City, you will find these indispensable if you wish to look like a native.

December 22, 2011

Why Nazis?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Media, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

A British MP is being investigated for attending a “Nazi-themed” party. A member of the royal family is photographed wearing Nazi regalia to a costume party. World War 2 fiction about Nazi Germany vastly outsells similar fiction about Fascist Italy or Imperial Japan. What is it about the Nazis that Brits find so fascinating? In a Spectator article from 2002, Guy Walters tracks the onset of the Nazi fascination in young Brits:

In some Englishmen this interest has mutated into a not-so-guilty admiration for the Nazis and their uniforms, their pageantry, their military brilliance and — this is the really terrible part — their brutality. It is emphatically not a condoning of the Holocaust; rather, a fetish that exists despite it. In its advanced state the fetish will have evolved into a secret yearning to march up and down a bedroom in the togs of a Hauptsturmführer, riding-boots shining, the red swastika armband set smartly against the blackness of the tunic, the silver death’s-head badge glinting on the peaked cap. Of course, the Beevor reader is a far cry from a Nazi fetishist; but I wonder whether Beevor would enjoy such staggering sales figures if he had written only about the war in the Far East.

[. . .]

At the end of term, the flu now conveniently in remission, Mr Priestley unearths the projector and makes a selection from the school’s extensive range of films. The product of a broad mind, the library consists of just two works, The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone. Our nascent fetishist will be particularly drawn by the stylish ease with which David Niven carries off the wearing of an SS officer’s uniform. He will be less than impressed, however, with Edward Fox’s absurdly pukka sergeant in the latter film.

His small head brimming with Nazis, our subject goes home for four solid weeks of constructing Airfix Messerschmitts, Stukas, Heinkels and Dorniers. He will know that the correct colour of the underside of most Luftwaffe aircraft corresponds to Humbrol’s ‘duck-egg blue’. If his condition is particularly advanced, the subject’s mother will be asked to purchase a Tamiya Jagdpanther tank, which he will place in a ‘diorama’, a word he will use in no other context. By now, he should be showing further classic early symptoms of a Nazi fetish: Allied aircraft and armour will hold little or no interest. Most of the young fetishist’s exercise books will be adorned with thousands of tiny swastikas.

[. . .]

By puberty, the fetishist will have repeatedly watched every war film available, including A Bridge Too Far, The Night of the Generals, The Dirty Dozen, The Eagle Has Landed, The Boys from Brazil, Cross of Iron and, for a younger generation, Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. He will have read Pat Reid’s Escape from Colditz and Airey Neave’s They Have Their Exits.

When our subject starts in the sixth form, it is here that the fetish can be incorporated into, and disguised by, his academic studies. Naturally he chooses modern history for one of his A-levels, and his special topic will, of course, be Nazi Germany. He will now be introduced to the diaries of Nazi bigwigs such as Albert Speer, which will breathe life into sinister figures such as Himmler and Goering. In fact, the widespread predilection for Nazi Germany as an A-level subject has angered many university tutors, who have complained recently that it is the only period of history about which undergraduates have any real knowledge.

December 18, 2011

Vaclav Havel has died, aged 75

Filed under: Books, Europe, Government, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Matt Welch has a post at Hit & Run quoting his profile of Havel from 2003:

Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay. Both men, in self-described sentiment, were of “the left,” yet both men infuriated the left with their stinging criticism and ornery independence. Both were haunted by the Death of God, delighted by the idiosyncratic habits of their countrymen, and physically diminished as a direct result of their confrontation with totalitarians (not to mention their love of tobacco). As essentially neurotic men with weak mustaches, both have given generations of normal citizens hope that, with discipline and effort, they too can shake propaganda from everyday language and stand up to the foulest dictatorships.

Unlike Orwell, Havel lived long enough to enjoy a robust third act, and his last six months in office demonstrated the same kind of restless, iconoclastic activism that has made him an enemy of ideologues and ally of freedom lovers for nearly five decades.

December 11, 2011

QotD: Alcohol

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:20

It has been said that alcohol is a good servant and a bad master. Nice try. The plain fact is that it makes other people, and indeed life itself, a good deal less boring. Kingsley grasped this essential fact very early in life, and (so to speak) never let go of the insight. This does not mean that there are not wine bores, single-malt bores, and people who become even more boring when they themselves have a tipple. You will meet them, and learn how to recognize them (and also how to deal with them) in these pages.

In my opinion Kingers — which I was allowed to call him — was himself a very slight cocktail bore. Or, at least, he had to affect to be such in order to bang out a regular column on drinks for the pages of a magazine aimed at the male population. In “real” life, Amis was a no-nonsense drinker with little inclination to waste a good barman’s time with fussy instructions. However, there was an exception which I think I can diagnose in retrospect, and it is related to his strong admiration for the novels of Ian Fleming. What is James Bond really doing when he specifies the kind of martini he wants and how he wants it? He is telling the barman (or bartender if you must) that he knows what he is talking about and is not to be messed around. I learned the same lesson when I was a restaurant and bar critic for the City Paper in Washington, D.C. Having long been annoyed by people who called knowingly for “a Dewar’s and water” instead of a scotch and water, I decided to ask a trusted barman what I got if I didn’t specify a brand or label. The answer was a confidential jerk of the thumb in the direction of a villainous-looking tartan-shaded jug under the bar. The situation was even grimmer with gin and vodka and became abysmal with “white wine”, a thing I still can’t bear to hear being ordered. If you don’t state a clear preference, then your drink is like a bad game of poker or a hasty drug transaction: It is whatever the dealer says it is. Please do try to bear this in mind.

Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

December 10, 2011

“It was not, all in all, Canada’s finest hour. Perhaps that’s why we still don’t talk about it much.”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Robert Fulford on the event in Ottawa that started the Cold War:

For just one moment in history, Canada found itself at the dangerous centre of global politics. That was in 1945, when Igor Gouzenko left the Russian embassy in Ottawa with documents proving the Soviet Union was spying on Canada with the help of Canadian communists.

Gouzenko’s revelations were the opening shot in the Cold War. A new book, Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage by David Levy, takes a rambling, anecdotal approach to a major figure in the story, the only Canadian member of Parliament ever convicted of conducting espionage for a foreign state.

Official Ottawa reacted badly to the news that there were spies in its midst. The government arrested the suspects and locked them up for weeks, without access to lawyers or families. They were paraded before a secret royal commission and persuaded to incriminate themselves. Gouzenko was given a new identity to protect him from Soviet assassins but the Mounties leaked nasty stories about him. For decades journalists treated him as a money-grubbing clown rather than the hero that he was.

Today the case remains largely unexplored and poorly remembered. Among those involved, only Gouzenko described his experience in a book, This Was My Choice, a rather thin and hasty account. Twentieth Century Fox produced a forgettable adaptation, The Iron Curtain, with Dana Andrews as Gouzenko.

November 28, 2011

Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:

So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)

1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.

Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).

So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …

2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.

Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.

That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.

November 15, 2011

Salman Rushdie: Facebook is run by morons

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:09

There’s this chap on Facebook called Ahmed Rushdie. He’s a tad unhappy with Facebook over their naming policies:

Facebook has upset Salman Rushdie after the company initially refused to let the controversial author use his common name rather than his first name when signing up to the network.

The writer, who is a newcomer to the Web2.0 game, explained on Twitter that his full name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie.

“Amazing. 2 days ago FB deactivated my page saying they didn’t believe I was me. I had to send a photo of my passport page. THEN…” he tweeted, “they said yes, I was me, but insisted I use the name Ahmed which appears before Salman on my passport and which I have never used.

“NOW… They have reactivated my FB page as ‘Ahmed Rushdie,’ in spite of the world knowing me as Salman. Morons. @MarkZuckerbergF? Are you listening?”

The author of The Satanic Verses, who was forced into hiding in 1989 when a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie was issued against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, continued to rant about his Facebook plight on Twitter.

October 29, 2011

More on Malthus

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Tim Harford poses and answers some common questions about the much-talked-about 7-billionth birth:

There will be 7bn of us come Halloween? You’re kidding.

Someone at the UNPFA has a sense of humour, it seems. This is a terrifying prospect to some and cheery for others, while most of us find it irrelevant. Halloween seems appropriate.

This is a statistical projection, and statistical projections don’t have a sense of humour.

But they do have margins of error. The UNPFA doesn’t even know whether the seven billionth person will be born in 2011. Even the UK is currently relying on 10-year old census data. There are places in the world where the data are decades old and we’re just guessing at the population. Still, such celebrations — if they are celebrations — do pass the time.

[. . .]

So Malthus was wrong?

Even Robert Malthus realised that there was such a thing as birth control. His more excitable successors, such as Paul Ehrlich, author in 1968 of The Population Bomb, have been fairly thoroughly rebutted by subsequent events. Dan Gardner, author of the fascinating Future Babble, summarises Ehrlich’s three scenarios for the 1980s as “everybody dies” (starvation-triggered nuclear war), “every third human dies” (starvation-triggered virus) and in the optimistic scenario “a billion people still die of starvation”.

October 28, 2011

Malthus provides “cover” for racism

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Tim Black explores why Thomas Malthus’ ideas have never been more popular than they are today:

Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) — the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly — would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’

Earlier this summer, a columnist for Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.

Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based: An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading.

October 22, 2011

IPCC authors: “They are people who are at the top of their profession”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

Whether you’re a global warming/climate change skeptic or not, Donna Laframboise has a book that might be of interest to you:

The people who write the IPCC’s report — which is informally known as the Climate Bible — are supposedly the crème de la crème of world science. Rajendra Pachauri, the person who has been the IPCC’s chairman since 2002, tells us this repeatedly. In 2007 he explained to a newspaper how his organization selects individuals to help write the Climate Bible: “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done,” he said. “They are people who are at the top of their profession.”

Two years later, when testifying before a committee of the U.S. Senate, Pachauri argued that “all rational persons” should be persuaded by the IPCC’s conclusions since his organization mobilizes “the best talent available across the world.”

[. . .]

A close look at the IPCC’s roster of authors reveals that — on a wide range of topics including hurricanes, sea-level rise, and malaria — some of the world’s most seasoned specialists have been left out in the cold. In their stead, the IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students.

For example, Laurens Bouwer is currently employed by an environmental studies institute at the VU University Amsterdam. In 1999-2000, he served as an IPCC lead author before earning his Masters degree in 2001.

How can a young man without even a master’s degree become an IPCC lead author? Bouwer’s expertise is in climate change and water resources. Yet the chapter for which he first served as a lead author was titled Insurance and Other Financial Services.

It turns out that, during part of 2000, Bouwer was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance Company. This means the IPCC chose as a lead author someone who was a trainee, who lacked a master’s degree, and was still a full decade away from receiving his 2010 PhD.

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