In an upbeat mood after arriving in Lima, Peru a couple of days ago to attend U.N. climate talks, former U.S. vice president Al Gore opted for a pithy approach (whew!) to arguing on behalf of the cause that made him a one-percenter and got him a Nobel Prize.  As reported here, Gore…quoted poetry.  The flip-side of this tactic evidently escaped him: reputable scientists have shown that statistical analyses used to support global warming claims come closer to poetry than science.  Oops!

Here are the quotes Gore reportedly used: 

Lu Xun, China:

Hope is a path on the mountainside.

At first there is no path.

But then there are people passing that way.

And there is a path.

Antonio Machado, Spain:

Traveler, there is no path.

You must make the path as you walk.

Wallace Stevens, U.S.:

After the final no, there comes a yes

And on that yes, the future world depends.

As to Lu Xun, I doubt Gore really believes that citing platitudes will convince the Chinese government to do something about the pollutants gushing out of their factories’ smokestacks – which may explain the “soft power” gambit: wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more, say no more.  Good luck with that, Al.

As to Stevens, was one of our major poets really a global warmist, way ahead of his time?  I have The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954) and decided to take a look, suspecting that Gore was more than likely quoting out of context.  The lines occur at the beginning of “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.”  Here is the full text (p. 247 of the 1981 printing):

After the final no there comes a yes

And on that yes the future world depends.

No was the night. Yes is this present sun.

If the rejected things, the things denied,

Slid over the western cataract, yet one,

One only, one thing that was firm, even

No greater than a cricket's horn, no more

Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech

Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,

One thing remaining, infallible, would be

Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!

Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,

Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,

Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:

The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,

The aureole above the humming house...

 

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

It doesn’t take expertise in literary criticism to conclude that this poem has nothing whatever to do with global warming, despite the reference to the sun (line 3).  Gore was indeed quoting out of context, using whatever suited his purpose and ignoring the rest.

I won’t speculate what the poem is about, but it does seem to me that the last sentence, which Stevens must have set apart for a reason, expresses an important insight.  The final sentence can be read as a reminder (warning?) that truth can be elusive and the search for it never-ending.  We should be skeptical – the poet might have added if pressed – about claims of “settled science,” especially in the face of evident doubt.

Of course, to the global warming community this insight is not just “an inconvenient truth”; it is heresy.  Was Gore hoping nobody would know the Stevens poem or bother to check?  I don’t know.  It’s likely he just went ahead with whatever a lowly staffer supplied because it sounded good and he could do an “elder statesman” shtick.

What is certain, however, is that as vice president of the Hartford Insurance Company, Wallace Stevens would have been appalled by the enormous financial burden placed on our industry by environmental regulations designed to appease zealots like Al Gore.