**** UPDATE: No. 14 on SPIEGEL Bestseller List! ****
This is stunningly phenomenal. According to spokeswoman Julia Strack at Hoffmann & Campe publishing, 20,000 copies have been distributed over the last week and:
It will enter the German bestseller list on Monday as number 14.”
“Die kalte Sonne” is also the No. 1 seller at publisher Hoffmann & Campe.
Source: Hoffmann & Campe Top Ten List
The NWZ daily in Oldenburg writes here:
Seldom has a book about climate change and the role of CO2 on climate fired up the debate like ‘Die kalte Sonne’ has. For many climate activists, the book’s subtitle is a provocation: ‘Why the climate catastroiphe is not taking place’ – which is viewed as playing down the harm and risk to the Earth’s climate.”
The NWZ then writes:
The demand for the book is large. At the moment the book is out of print and will go through another printing, Vahrenholt reported.”
Being in the top 20 is great news. In fact, all books in the top 20 are normally placed at the entrance of the book-shops near the cash registers. This will further bolster sales.
Mass press coverage
Although climate activists have blasted the book, major media outlets have been giving it ample coverage. Here are some quotes from the press collected by Hoffmann & Campe:
“While all of Europe Freezes these days, Fritz Vahrenholt is providing a heated debate.“ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 Feb. 2012
“Vahrenholt (62) a maverick who conveys the current zeitgeist.“ www.zeitonline.de, 6 February 2012
“…Germany’s most naughty renewable energy manager…“ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 29 January 2012
“… is Vahrenholt also a hardnosed climate skeptic?“ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 Feb 2012
“With his claims on climate change Professor Fritz Vahrenholt […] has provided for headlines.“ – Welt am Sonntag, 12 Feb 2012
“A new book on climate change has […] triggered a heated discussion. Thus the authors plead that imthat everybody keep a cool head. In this country this is going to be tough to do.“ – Die Welt, 11 Feb 2012
The warmists, in their attempts to slam the book, have only succeeded in driving it up near the top of bestseller lists. Worse is that once people read the book, they are never going to believe the hoax again.
It needs to be noted that most of the warmists who have blasted the book have not even read it. Mojib Latif confirmed that on ARD television when asked if he bought the book. He said he “read parts of it here and there”. So of course he isn’t going to have a clue about the book’s arguments, and thus he ends up saying dumb things that will come back to him later.
Visit the “Die kalte Sonne” website here. It now has a translation function to English, upper right corner of the page!
So it goes with propaganda. You can summarize it in two sentences and you do not have to read books.
A lot of media except Die Zeit and taz will watch this. Bild made a first offensive. AGW doesn’t sell anything anymore. Once the foot-draggers smell blood we will see a feeding frenzy. Spiegel has already positioned themselves as neutral. I hear their copying and pasting as they trawl the blogosphere to compose a nice story.
(taz will sit in their agitprop corner and wither; Die Zeit will not understand what happened.)
Die Zeit publishes, as expected, a smear piece.
http://www.zeit.de/2012/07/Klimawandel-Vahrenholt
Contains: Big Oil Smear, equating skeptics with far right wing, anti-liberal (“liberal” in German means “libertarian”; but Die Zeit probably wants to own the word the way the American progressives conquered it) Islam-haters. Characterizes skeptics as last remainders of resistance against consensus.
“Man muss sich vor Augen führen, wie stark der Konsens in der scientific community inzwischen ist” – “One has to imagine how strong the consensus in the scientific community has become”.
Author gets his head handed to him by the commenters, surprisingly.
Die Zeit? There are three kinds of people:
1. Those who make things happen,
2. Those who watch things happen,
3, and those who wonder what happened.
If there is anyone out there looking for material for a thesis on the climate of ideas, public debate, or the like: store the links, make screenshots, save the files: you will not find a better clearcut example of a “tipping point” when orthodoxy turned into a house of cards overnight and the emperor was revealed as rather underclothed.
Even though I can not read German (can do Dutch), I find the Google translator always adequate to catch the ‘drift’ of a story. On the German Amazon.de page there are some severe criticisms of Dr Varenholt’s book and the average rating is about two stars. It looks like the full German AGW mob and lobbyists are out in force doing their very best to stop people from buying this book. The danger of them loosing their cushy jobs gives them added impetus?
Given that you have a very large population – can’t recall – but is a lot more than the UK, 20 000 copies is not enough to change the mindset. If the number of this book sold start exceeding a million or two I’ll take heart. In the meantime we are just on the fringes?
There are 80 million Germans; not that much more than the UK with 60 mill.
Remember that this is not “Twilight” or “Harry Potter” but non-fiction. And it is non-alarmist! When was the last time a NON alarmist story sold that much? The only book that I can think of is The Skeptical Environmentalist.
It’s already a massive success.
And I think we will see a new Ice Age alarmism in the years to come. It always changes cyclically, as detailed here.
http://butnowyouknow.wordpress.com/those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history/climate-change-timeline/
One caveat: That coming Ice Age alarmism MIGHT BE RIGHT THIS TIME, as the solar slumber takes hold.
Based on what evidence and reasoning? In your own words please.
Your wish is my command, directly from my notes:
David Archibald und n paar andere sagen voraus; solar cycle 24, der in dem
wir sind, wird 17 Jahre lang; im Maunder minimum warens erst 18, dann 20 und 22,
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/01/global-cooling-coming-archibald-uses-solar-and-surface-data-to-predict-4-9c-fall/
Solar cycle 24 wird in NORWEGEN allein 1.5 Grad C cooling bewirken; all the ewarming from
the 20th century will be WIPED OUT
Friis-Christensen and Lassen theory
Dirk, are you a Greek accountant? 🙂
From the UK’s point of view there are one-third more Germans, which is a substantial amount in anybody’s book;, unless you work for a hedge fund, Green energy supplier, or the IMF!
Let’s hope it sells in copious quantities.
And I do agree, from the photographs it appears as if the bearing of Dr Varenholt is remarkable, he looks like a man with gravitas and presence, just the kind of guy you would like to be on your side when you go into a press battle. What is the German view of this guy?
What I wanted to say is we’re not twice as much or more than the UK population. What’s a 33% difference amongst friends.
Vahrenholt’s standing? The left of centre press has been railing for ages about the “greed” of the “energy concerns”; they’d love it best to re-nationalize them, or replace “Big mighty energy” with “Cuddly harmless decentralized democratic energy”; you know the kind that doesn’t go poof and everything’s radioactive. So he lands no points there, even though he’s SPD. RWE, Eon and Vattenfall are HATED by that half of the population. They would all LOVE to be customers of Greenpeace Energy if it weren’t so darn expensive. So they’re customers of Eon, RWE and Vattenfall and HATE it.
For the other half, he’s a reasonable guy one should listen to.
I’m oversimplifying, but not much. I’m not speaking from theory, in one of my last projects a colleague was very hardline social democrat and we loved to argue with each other. And one boss was a Greenpeace member. Who tried to defend the hockeystick.
Another way to think about changing minds is that when people I call local leaders (parents, teachers, employers, managers) read Die kalte Sonne, they will tell kids, students, employees, etc. Some of them will then inform themselves further; some won’t but they will have heard a non-warmist version of AGW. They will tell their friends, etc and over time the idea that indeed we are not destroying the earth with Man-Made CO2 will inevitably spread.
I didn’t pay any attention to CAGW until I read about Climategate 1.0 in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. I freaked out. I told everybody I knew, my family, my employees, (I own a business), my students (I teach part-time) and over time I have seen a lot of people go from apathetic to informed.
Thilo Sarrazin’s book (Deutschland schafft sich ab/Germany abolishes itself) started out with a print run of 25,000; by now, there are 1.3 million in print (all of them hardcovers; as long as it is still selling briskly, the publisher will not bring out a paperback edition); you can bet that the publisher will not stop priting after the first batch is sold.
I have “The IQ trap”. Sarrazin used it as one source AFAIK. I can recommend the book. Didn’t know that Sarrazin sold so many.
What is the second print run?
Good question, lets hope it’s 100,000.
O/T Noteworthy op-ed on Fox about the safety of nuclear power.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/07/23/nuclear-power-is-extremely-safe-thats-truth-about-what-learned-from-japan/
“Beckmann’s book came out in 1976–three years before the Three Mile Island “disaster,” which nuclear critics capitalized on, even though it was, as Beckmann later wrote, “history’s only major disaster with a toll of zero dead, zero injured, and zero diseased.” “
After the hard cover market is exploited, then the paper back market, and finally the much, much larger cheap e book market. Pretty soon it will be translated to English and that will vastly expand its market. This book will be huge.
The fact that the author spent many years as an important exec in renewable energy gives him huge credibility. He should do well on TV defending the book vs the typical TV airhead, he is a very smart guy, extremely well informed, with the smoothness and political/communication skills of a high level corporate exec.
Here is an interesting article about a study of 4000 years of ice cores from Greenland:
http://lockerroom.johnlocke.org/2012/02/15/a-4000-year-greenland-temperature-record/
Best to read at least the summary but a very interesting conclusion of the study is that there have been at least 72 decades in the last 4000 years that were warmer than the present decade.
German grid was close to breakdown over the past days. Energy traders tried to buy as little as possible when exchange price was at 7 times normal; leading to a depletion of the “Regelleistung” (reserve excess power (I assume) nominally designated for technical problems). Der Spiegel blames “greed of market participants”; well, that’s the leftist codeword for economic behaviour of people they don’t like (everyone who earns money). “Not the nuke phase-out but the greed of market participants has nearly wrecked the electricity supply.” So we know who’s to blame. They will get back to this story when the blackout comes.
(Oh, as an aside, the accusations are not proven)
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/0,1518,815587,00.html
“Regelleistung” is just the word for the available peaker plant power. So they probably hit the limits during the cold, had to activate those old “cold reserve” plants, and blame energy traders for it.
More details at Focus. And less leftist codewords.
http://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/gefaehrliche-unterdeckung-an-kalten-tagen-deutsches-stromnetz-stand-kurz-vorm-kollaps-_aid_714671.html
By not buying expensive regular ‘leccy, which got that expensive due to high French demand, traders later needed to resort to buying “Regelleistung” ‘leccy, which has a fixed price of 100 EUR / MWh – which was far cheaper than regular power! In other words, absurd regulations at work. By not pre-ordering regular but buying “emergency reserves” later, traders saved money!