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Following reference 1 earlier in the month, I am now reading reference 2, a story involving a lot of global warming from the distant past by a palaeontologist, loosely a person who studies ancient life by means of fossils, by means of the record in the rock, records which may be hundreds of millions of years old. Or to be more precise, I am just starting my second read, the first having been more by way of a survey than a study.

This morning I notice that the book is published by Smithsonian, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. Whereas I thought that the Smithsonian was an important collection of museums in the US, their equivalent, more or less, of our own British Museum. However, I go to reference 3, to find a museum flavoured website which tells me that Smithsonian books are distributed through Penguin Random House Publisher Services, which sounds a bit like a publishing version of Amazon Marketplace.

Then I go to reference 4 and search for Smithsonian, to turn up lots of books with a Smithsonian flavour, mostly including the Smithsonian logo (snapped above). Poking around down the bottom of the opening page, I find that the Harper Collins is actually owned by Murdoch's gang, News Corp, the people who bring us such illustrious titles as the 'The Sun'.

While searching the Penguin site, reference 5, for harper, I get plenty of books involving harpers in their titles or authors but no publisher of that name. Harper Collins seems to be different from Penguin Random House. All terribly confusing - and the Tories seem to think that they can stir all this sort of thing up by breaking all our links with the EU without causing all kinds of trouble.

By way of actual advertisement for the book I started with, I offer the following thought of Ward: that all the ice will have melted by the year 3000 and sea levels will have risen around 200 feet. Which according to one of the many helpful websites about sea levels, means that most of eastern England will be under water and here at Epsom we will be at the seaside, with no further need to travel down to the south coast. But who cares about what is going to happen all those years away in the future? As far ahead as the Battle of Hastings is behind. How close will we have to get before we start doing something serious about it?

From where I jump to the book of Ecclesiastes (reference 6), written maybe two and a half thousand years ago, where the author tells us of the vanity of all human things, all destined to be lost under a sea of sand; build your pyramid ever so tall, it will go in the end. Maybe he knew a thing or two.

PS: I got my copy of the book from 'Better World Books Marketplace West' via Amazon. People whom I find to be a good source of very reasonably priced books.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/global-warming.html.

Reference 2: Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future - Peter D. Ward - 2007.

Reference 3: https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/. Smithsonian.

Reference 4: https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/. Harper Collins.

Reference 5: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/. Penguin Random House.

Reference 6: The book of Ecclesiastes - the Preacher (aka Koheleth) - 500BCE.