THE NOT SO FINAL COUNTDOWN: The Legacy of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth 20 Years Later.

In 1983, Michael Barkun, a professor at Syracuse University, identified the rise of a “New Apocalypticism” in American life. He described a secular variant of religious millenarianism — rooted not in scripture but instead in science, yet structurally identical in its essential features.

Barkun explained:

“The so-called “New Apocalypticism” is undeniably religious, rooted in the Protestant millenarian tradition. Religious apocalypticism is, however, not the only apocalypticism current in American society. A newer, more diffuse, but indisputably influential apocalypticism coexists with it. Secular rather than religious, this second variety grows out of a naturalistic world view, indebted to science and to social criticism rather than to theology. Many of its authors are academics, the works themselves directed at a lay audience of influential persons — government officials, business leaders, and journalists — presumed to have the power to intervene in order to avert planetary catastrophe.”

Gore’s orations perfectly followed the script of the “New Apocalypticism”: The identification of an existential crisis, the diagnosis of human sin as its cause, the urgency of transformation, and the comfort of redemption for those who heed the warning. The climate science community readily embracted this script and adopted the language of believers and deniers to differentiate those with faith and those yet to be converted, and who risked excommunication.

Barkun explained that scientific “predictions of “last things” generate the feelings of awe that have always surrounded eschatology, even if in this case the predictions often grow out of computer modelling rather than Biblical proof-texts.”

Gore was an extraordinarily skilled evangelist and he took his message to scientists on their own terms — with a PowerPoint presentation.

But even so, An Inconvenient Truth was not really about science; it was a sermon — complete with a moral arc (with those who are evil and those who are righteous), a clear account of sin (fossil fuel emissions), a warning of coming judgment (floods, storms, tipping points), and a path to redemption (political will, renewable energy, personal responsibility). The film ends with a call to conversion.

Scarcity for thee, but not for me. Gore’s credibility ended in 2013 with a really fat check from Middle East petrostate Qatar.

Al has sold Current, for the magnificent sum of $500-million, $100-million of which is his alone. Not bad for a TV station with less reach and inferior programming to most billboards.

To whom did the Lord of the Upper Atmosphere sell? Why to al Jazeera — which is to say, effectively to the ruler of Qatar, a wealthy country that has nothing else to sustain it but the sale of its huge petroleum resources.

Qatar is about oil, oil and more oil. It is a global warmer’s hell.

But what a paycheck! When Al Gore emerged from his energy-guzzling mansion to address the Senate in 2007 only to refuse to take his own energy reduction pledge from An Inconvenient Truth when presented to him by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Ann Coulter quipped, “I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”