At least my book isn't "slop"

New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill recently wrote a piece titled "I Got Slopped," in which she describes learning that an AI-written "biography" of her life had been published on Amazon. Google informs us that "AI slop is low-quality, mass-produced digital content created using generative artificial intelligence."

Apparently there's a deluge of AI slop books, many of them biographies, appearing lately on Amazon, which has a print on demand service. Some "authors" produce massive numbers of them, using AI to find, organize, and "write" about information in the public domain regarding their subjects.

Hill quotes researchers as saying the number of  e-books published per month on Amazon has tripled, to 300,000, since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Wanting to explore the phenomenon she'd stumbled upon, Hill contacted and directly interviewed a prolific slop writer named Bill Johns, who was happy to explain how he operates. Johns has published 445 books—on topics such as sports, eccentric geniuses, famous bridges, alcohol, the Chesapeake Bay—for sale on Amazon. Johns says he sells a few hundred books per month, at an average profit to him of around $7 per book. "It’s bar money at least," he told Hill. Johns aims to "write" ten books per week.

Johns told Hill she deserved a 400-page biography, not the paltry 90-page one that she got. She declined his offer.

Welcome, then, to our brave new world, where reality is increasingly, if not created, then at least chronicled, by machines and software acting as intelligent agents.

I myself have been a lifelong writer of the human sort, though not professionally, and not, until recently, of books. This blog, which constitutes the largest accumulation of my work, is now 21 years old. And I got a late start. All the essays here have been written the old-fashioned way, by me. I work hard to write well. I hope I sometimes succeed, although that's for you, dear reader, to judge. A single essay can sometimes take eight hours, with sometimes dozens of further edits in the days after it's posted.

Having accumulated by now a decent-sized body of work, it occurred to me that there might be some stuff here worthy of a book. So last December I published Does It Hurt To Think about Climate?: Essays on Global Warming, available from Amazon. All the essays first appeared on this blog.

I introduced the book here last year. As I explained then, I make no money at all on sales, which might surprise you considering the book's price. Unlike for the slop authors, money making was never an objective. I priced the book as low as Amazon will allow, leaving nothing for me. The high price is due to the fact that I selected white paper and the highest quality color ink. The book contains some color photos and graphics that I wanted to reproduce well, but that drove up the cost of printing. I'd do it differently now.

Although I'd be truly honored for my book to be on your bookshelf, I can understand why you'd not want to fork over the dough. You can, however, read all the book's essays on this blog, for free. Here they are, in the order in which they appear in the book:

Waving at Volcanoes 

Ice Ages Revisited: A Story of Climate 

PragerU offers "thought-provoking questions"

Mike Johnson: "I don't think..."

Krauthammer Disappoints 

It's George Will's brain that is melting away 

The Reddest Herring

Lefty Liberal Tomfoolery

Reckoning The Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

The book also contains a Preface that isn't currently available online, plus an addition after the "Reckoning" essay titled "Skeptical Scientists: Roy Spencer as a case study". It also contains some postscripts at the end of some essays.

Global warming is presently going in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, the U.S. public at large seems less interested and engaged than several years ago. Perhaps that's because of Covid, inflation, the high cost of living, stupid wars, and political discontent generally crowding out climate concerns.

On the other hand, the planet continues to warm rapidly, whether we're paying attention or not. The ten hottest years in the instrumental record have all occurred in the past decade. France has already had three major heatwaves this year. Europe had 10,000 heat-related deaths in late June. A shockingly strong "Super El Nino" is presently developing in the Pacific, which could easily drive global temperatures to new highs. As I write this, France and Spain are fighting historic climate-driven wildfires. A New York Times headline on July 29 reads: "112 Degrees in Paris, Flames Near Bordeaux. France Can’t Go On Like This." Air conditioning is somewhat uncommon in France. Can you imagine? A July 30 headline says "Europe’s Summer of Reckoning Is ‘Just the Beginning’".

A Swedish climate scientist said "2026 is just the beginning. It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation."

A recurrent theme in my book is that while natural climactic variation has absolutely occurred over the eons, the planet is currently warming far faster—stupendously faster—from human causes than it ever has from purely natural ones. Uninformed persons (Mike Johnson, for example, who has his own essay) blather about "natural" variation, but they don't understand it in the slightest. The "PragerU" essay describes severe warming that occurred tens of millions of years ago, during which crocodiles and palm trees existed north of the Arctic Circle, and no ice sheets existed on the planet. Sea levels were hundreds of feet higher than today.

But it took millions of years for the planet to get that hot—a process that I describe in the essay. And as the essay explains, atmospheric CO2 concentration, which fundamentally drives climate, is increasing 10,000 times faster today than back then under "natural" conditions. More recently (geologically speaking) CO2 concentration never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm) over the past million years; today it is 425 ppm and rising nonstop.

In the "Volcanoes" essay and others I point out that until now the climate has been remarkably stable for the entire period of human civilization, but that we are now moving outside that zone of stability at a frightening rate. Human civilization has never experienced what we're headed for in the not-too-distant future.

Given all that, I thought it could be useful to pull the relevant essays together into a book. I hope that, one place or another, you will read them.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.