Camille, and her way with words

As a global warming agnostic, I dislike the way that Gore’s preachy, apocalyptic fundamentalism has fomented an atmosphere of hysteria around this issue and potentially compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism. Democrats who long for his return as the anti-Hillary may not realize how Gore has become a risible cartoon character for much of the country at large. Anyone who listens to talk radio has been repeatedly regaled by clips of Gore bizarrely going off the deep end at one speech or another. And Gore, far worse than Hillary, is the Phantom of a Thousand Accents — telegraphing his supercilious condescension to whatever audience he’s trying to manipulate.

Toronto’s National Post has been running a fascinating series by Lawrence Solomon on global warming dissidents, who don’t get much press in the U.S. My own philosophy about earth’s titanic, humanity-dwarfing operations is contained in a curious video I recently found on YouTube.com. Clips of volcanic eruptions and magma flows are set to the abstract “psychedelic” music of a California rock group, the Danbury Shakes. This eerie fusion of lurid natural images with a distorted, clashing soundscape is richly evocative of a 1960s vision that has been lost. The ’60s revolution, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was about much more than politics. Fanaticism about global warming reduces the eternal terrors of nature to a banal political melodrama.