Gore’s worlds colliding

Just one day after I discussed the November 2009 Newsweek cover showing Al Gore as eco-prophet with a green apple hovering mysteriously above him, which I said the magazine was using as a symbol of the environmental knowledge, still concealed from mankind, that according to Gore will save the world (see “Warmism at its height, just before the fall”), shareholders of the Apple Corporation, of which Gore is a board member, and which uses a partly eaten apple as its logo, drawing on the same symbolism as the Newsweek cover, castigated him in his presence at an Apple shareholders meeting:

Gore was seated in the first row, along with his six fellow board members, in Apple’s Town Hall auditorium as several stockholders took turns either bashing or praising his high-profile views on climate change….

[One shareholder] stood at the microphone and urged against Gore’s re-election to the board. Gore “has become a laughingstock. The glaciers have not melted…. If his advice he gives to Apple is as faulty as his views on the environment then he doesn’t need to be re-elected.”

Gore was re-elected to the board notwithstanding the criticisms.

UPDATE: Gene Koprowski at Fox News reports that Gore has fallen completely silent in the three months since Climategate broke, not responding to media inquiries about the state of warming, not responding to requests from Congress to testify on the subject. However, if you’re thinking that Gore must be falling apart or becoming deeply depressed because of the collapse of the global warming consensus that was the basis of his prophet status, I doubt that that’s the case. As we see from Obama’s undiminished arrogance in the light of all his stunning failures and loss of support, a true false messiah never loses his self-confidence, never admits that he was wrong.

Also, Koprowski has a nice turn of phrase. He writes:

Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for his film, An Inconvenient Truth. But in the last three months, as global warming has gone from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire, Gore—the public face of global warming—has been mum on the topic.

I like alliteration (the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several words in close succession) very much, and frequently use it myself. Here, the two phrases connected by the word “to”—“from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire”—each consists of two main words, and each of those words starts with an “s” (or a letter with an “s” sound) and has a “t.” The result is very musical and pleasing, as well as the thought being exactly stated.

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February 27

Diana M. writes:

Are you sertain that certitude starts with an s ?

LA replies:

Didn’t I say the sound, not the letter?

Diane M. replies:

You thought you did:

Here, the two phrases connected by the word “to”—“from a scientific near-certitude to the subject of satire”—each consists of two main words, and each of those words starts with an “s” and has a “t.”

LA replies:

Ok, but look at the definition of alliteration I gave just before that: “the repetition of the same consonant sound … “. So when I refer to “s,” that evidently means the “s” sound, not just the letter s.

However, since

We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us

(Hamlet speaking about the gravedigger, in Hamlet, Act V, Scene 1),

I’ve fixed it. Thanks. :-)

Diana M. replies:

Forgive my impertinence for galling your kibes. :)

… the age is grown so pick’d that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibes.

(Hamlet, from the same passage.)

I do respect your careful attention to language usage as the mark of a careful thinker.

Carol Iannone writes:

Interesting, it was pretty nervy of that shareholder to say that, especially since Gore was there and his re-election was probably a foregone conclusion. Is it really at the point of satire now, global warming?

LA replies:

The shareholder’s argument was entirely logical. If Gore is a promoter of a vast intellectual fraud, then his intellectual judgment is at best badly flawed. Why then should be be wanted as a member of the board of directors of a large business corporation?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2010 05:53 PM | Send