OK, this is petty of The Tracker. The stalwart Sharon Begley got the cover story at Newsweek about one of our time’s more substantial men, Al Gore, and you know what line struck me hardest in its opening grafs? This one: “The mountain man beard he grew in the wake of the Florida recount debacle of 2000 is long gone, and the extra weight, which hung on several more years, is nowhere in evidence.” What!? Mr. Nobel Prize global warming spear carrier is no longer semi-globular himself?!  He really is a man of change.

The theme of her story is that Gore, while ever the crusader against greenhouse gases and their impacts, remains intellectually nimble. Hence the story’s hed: The Evolution Of An  Eco-Prophet. She also reveals the prodigious research effort – made easier by the fact he is after all Al Gore and thus able to summon sources at will to spill everything they know – that went into his just-out book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. And, one is happy to see, she pointedly writes up high that he is a former newspaper reporter who, following tradition, made deadline but only barely.

She also provides plenty for people who find Gore exasperating. Take a look.

By the way, for those who follow the intricate interior warfare among those who worry about the greenhouse, Climate blogger ranter global warming fighting soldier Joseph Romm comes up in the Newsweek piece. Romm was among Gore’s sounding boards as he wrote the book.  Romm has his own enthusiastic self-referential review of the book at Grist. And Romm, one must say, is controversial and divisive – mainly because at his blog Climate Progress he can be so extraordinarily angry at those who disagree with him just a little bit (see this one for a vituperative example of an attack on somebody – to the point of trying to foment a popular campaign against his livelihood – who is hardly a global warming skeptic. Andy Revkin gets somewhat similar treatment from Romm. I never have met him. But one wonders why he is as he is).

- Charlie Petit

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