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It’s hard not being green

In the first week of December 2008, blizzards closed roads and schools across northern England and Scotland. Large parts of the UK were blanketed with snow for the third time in the 2008-09 winter. At the same time the UK government's Committee on Climate Change issued its first report on how Britain is to handle the terrifying threat of runaway global warming. Nature certainly has a keen sense of humour.
-Ian Plimer

It’s pretty hard to get published in this day and age. As any aspiring writer will tell you, it’s very hard to get a deal without being signed to a literary agent, and the best literary agents only want to sign published authors.

Unless you have a book to call your own and a decent amount of sales under your belt it’s not really very easy to break into the market. If you are trying to publish an authoritative non fiction tome it really does help to have an academic position somewhere along the line. But recently one man had all these things and was still turned down.

To be fair his book is not a fun read, at 500 pages and 2000 footnotes all written in a highly individual style it is hardly going to take on the Da Vinci Code.

But Professor Ian Plimer had already been published. His work Telling lies for God, a full on assault on creationism and those who use pseudo science to advance religious causes was printed by Random House and sold over 23,000 copies. The ABC and other bastions of the state owned media laid metaphorical laurels on his brow.

He followed it up with a more serious work, published by ABC books, called A Short History of Planet Earth. Being a more academic work it sold only 16,000 copies, still a more than respectable amount for an Australian writer on a fairly dry non fiction subject. But the critics liked it. Plimer won the prestigious Eureka Prize from the Australian museum, an award given out to reward excellence in the fields of scientific research & innovation, science leadership, school science and science journalism & communication.

The ABC loved him and with them the more educated and left leaning classes of Australia.

Yet when Plimer went back to ABC books to seek publication of a new book Heaven and earth, rather similar in nature to Telling lies for God in that it attacked those he believed were using science for unethical causes, the ABC turned him down flat. His professorship at the University of Adelaide helped him not, his sales in the tens of thousands availed him not, the ABC was simply not prepared to listen.

The reason he believes, and others worldwide now believe as well is that his book questioned both the science and the motives behind those who claim that global warming is a threat, and is caused by human actions.

As someone who has an inkling of the political scene in Australia, Plimer probably shouldn’t have been so naïve as to assume that the state funded broadcaster which is well known [although often denied] to lean to the left would have published a book that was critical of a left wing holy cow. But surely the evil “right wing” corporate publishers would back him right?

Wrong.

Random house, who published Telling lies for God, told him to take a running jump. In the period that elapsed before Plimer found a publisher Random House published two dozen books on climate change, all confirming the orthodox views as espoused by the Rudd government.

Allen and Unwin also turned him down, and went off to publish a pro-orthodox climate change title The Clean industrial revolution by Ben McNeil which sold poorly despite strong recommendations by Ross Garnaut, the economist close to Kevin Rudd.

East Street turned him down while publishing Cool Hunting Green a fashionista guide to decorating in an environmentally friendly manner to better cope with climate change.

Finally after scouring the country for publishers Plimer found one, Connor Court publishing, a tiny operation run out of a back room in a family home in the Victorian country town of Ballan [for those not familiar with Australia, a good comparison is an Island off Cornwall].

Until Plimer turned up it had a very poor quality website and mostly printed religious books of a very limited appeal. Plimer, on seeing the situation of the only publisher who would take him, refused to take an advance of any kind.

Connor courts largest ever print run had been 3000. Both the publisher Anthony Cappello and author agreed that this book would sell far better and planned for an overall print run of 5000. It sold out in a few days. Within a fortnight 10,000 copies had been sold and Mr. Cappello was hurrying the printer for more. In its first twelve months Heaven and Earth has sold 30,000 copies in Australia. In America [where to judge from the range of titles available it seems an acceptance of diversity of opinions amongst publishers is more common] it has been on sale for 3 months and has sold 25,000 copies, a similar rush of sales in currently underway in the UK. It made it to 132 in the Amazon rankings for all books sold worldwide. Connor court no longer has a bad website. For a book that is not at all an easy read and is so packed with statistics and footnotes that would derail the casual reader this is astounding.

The reaction of the vested interests on the left was less positive. In July 2009 Plimer was interviewed by Spectator the longest running English language magazine in the world, describing the reactions from his critics he said:

“They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’” Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. “If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?”

Plimer has become an international celebrity, appearing on television and radio shows across the world, doing interviews for papers as diverse as the Wall Street Journal and Britain’s Daily Telegraph. But the reaction from the press in his homeland has been scathing.

With the exception of the usually lonely souls that make up the few conservative journalists in Australia the invective hurled from the fourth estate was unyielding and negative. The same news outlets that had lauded him now called him a shill for the fossil fuel industry.

Fran Kelly of the ABC [Australian version of the BBC, and perhaps even more biased] attacked him for being published by a small publisher, Robert Manne a member of the faculty at La Trobe University Melbourne and the sometimes dictatorial head of the left leaning Monthly magazine attacked the Australian newspaper [in a comment piece printed in the same newspaper] for not attacking Plimer enough.

The Australian science media centre [an avowedly non partisan body] printed responses by five scientists refuting Plimers claims, none of whom had actually read Plimers book. Ian Henschke the host of Stateline in South Australia repeatedly asked Plimer who was paying him to say such nasty things. Similar questions were asked by Tony Jones on the 7.30 report.

Australia does not have the media diversity of the UK; we have no version of the Daily Mail or even the Telegraph. Right of centre views are only heard on talk radio and in a few weekly columns read by almost no-one outside their state of origin. Australia is a big place, and lugging around printing presses is not particularly easy.

While harsh scrutiny of the backgrounds of those seeking to make a political point, or even just write a book, is of course good journalistic practise, one wonders why these respected figures of the news media never asked similar questions of Tim Flannery [Australia’s most famous climate lunatic] or Al Gore.

Both of whom have become fabulously wealthy off telling everyone that we are all going to die. Tim Flannery is heavily involved in Australian government funded geothermic power ventures that have sucked up 90 million in government money while producing not a kilowatt of power and has just been appointed to a new [well paid] government post overlooking sea levels. Al Gore, who left the Vice Presidency of the United States of America with a net worth of around 5 million, is set to become the world’s first climate change billionaire.

The far left Australian PM Kevin Rudd himself has said that there is a “vast conspiracy” by sceptics of the climate consensus backed by unnamed “vested interests”. He has accused man made global warming sceptics of deliberately knowing that their arguments are false, but continuing with them anyway, putting their own children at risk of death, because they were all in the pay of nefarious and presumably evil forces.

It’s really quite worrying that a Prime minister can get away with this sort of invective, and to the media’s credit across the board from Fairfax [left leaning newspaper group much like the Trinity Mirror group] to the ABC to the Newscorp stable [Yes Rupert Murdoch does own practically everything in his land of birth] the reaction was that Kevin had gotten a little too much sun.

It’s interesting to see how much a man can be hated, especially one who says things others do not want to be heard. It often does not matter if the man is right or wrong, in fact if he is right it is usually worse for him, no-one enjoys having a truth spoken that shatters convenient delusions. Such people can usually be dealt with, either by pointing out their lack of qualifications, or education or erudition, but sometimes they have the temerity to have all of these in spades.

So those who wish to destroy a man and his message must try harder. Usually they attack his character, make fun of his mannerisms or even his family. If “he” turns out to be a “she” they can resort to thinly veiled sexist abuse, the screams of “whore” and “slut” that were the refrain of protesters against Margaret Thatcher were screamed by people who were at the very same time campaigning against sexism in the workplace.

Similar abuse was hurled at the head of Pauline Hanson in Australia, and is still screeched at Sarah Palin. The guardians of the doors of political correctness do not appreciate it when an ethnic minority or a woman [groups they consider to be their moral property] chooses to wander off the politically correct plantation.

So what does this mean for public debate? Does it lead to a constraining of views and the narrowing of acceptable discussion? The answers to these questions are of course themselves debatable and could fill several books.

Think to yourself for a second. If you are like me and most of the population that makes up humanity you have learned to trust certain authorities. The idea that there is an innate skepticism in the minds humanity is sadly so much hogwash. We are used to accepting revealed truths. We accept them from our parents, from our friends and especially from those we consider wiser than ourselves. In fact people often seem to seek out revealed truths, leaving no stone, book or internet page unturned in the quest for someone more enlightened than ourselves.

The gatekeepers of these revealed truths are in the media and publishing industries. While the internet is indeed a new phenomenon in the world of information people tend to trust something more if they heard it on the radio, read it in the paper, saw it on the television or felt the binding of the book with their own hands. But what happens if the gatekeepers are compromised?

The fact that one of the best selling Australian non-fiction books of recent years could not find a publisher despite the fact that the author had previously sold well indicates [a heartening thought] that perhaps publishers do care about things other than money after all.

But when the things they consider when accepting or rejecting a book include the political orientation of its author that is something that should worry us all. Perhaps we are better off with them all being money grubbing capitalists.