I'm what you might call a reformed practitioner of the doom and gloom message. In the heady days of the 1990s through the early years of the Bush presidency, I was down in the trenches of Washington's NGO warzone, lobbing rhetorical bombshells at innocent citizens and (less innocent) reporters with reckless abandon. Every development was surely the one that would spell the end of the Clean Air Act or the New Deal or the Great Society or whatever. Hyperbole ruled the day.

Since then I've seen the light. As my ability and the ability of my peers to energize the public and interest journalists waned, I learned the hard way that maybe it's time to start talking about solutions rather than problems and working together rather than working up a lather.

So I don't write to defend Al Gore from Emily Yoffe's mostly accurate if a little lazy op-ed this morning in the Post. It's easy to judge Gore's efforts on behalf of climate change awareness as employing doom and gloom, and even to call them scare tactics.

And environment issues certainly aren't immune from the ill-effects of such tactics. If the dire end I predicted every time I sent out a press release or an action alert in my former life came to pass, we'd be living on an airless, waterless, smoldering, radioactive nightmare-scape.

That said, environmentalism was at loose ends just a few years ago. As documented in the slightly-dated feeling (but charmingly so) Death of Environmentalism (caution: PDF), tree-hugging, sandal-wearing and eight years of benign neglect under the Clinton administration had brought environmentalism to an unhappy crossroads.

The Bush administration's energetic (pun intended) efforts to undermine past progress certainly helped revitalize the movement and return the issue to prominence, but that return coincides with the rhetorical grenade-throwing efforts of Mr. Gore, as well. Up to that point, environmentalists lamented the fact that well-funded efforts to blinker the overwhelming scientific consensus had begun to take root, planting doubt about climate change in the minds of millions of devotees of conservative talk radio, right-wing blogs and former Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe.

Gore's efforts, and some convenient but more tangential evidence thrown in by Mother Nature, seem to have helped move the needle in the mind of the public. Most polling bears this out, though polling is considerably less scientific than, say, tracking ocean temperatures and whatnot.

Yoffe can't resist taking a page from those anti-climate change talking points and throwing in an Inhofe-esque blurb about the unfinished science on climate change and the relationship between climate and hurricanes, allowing to thrive once again the smirky meme that this whole thing is hokum cooked up by Gore to sell books. (To read shockingly clear and wonderfully frank scientists discussing climate and hurricanes, visit RealClimate.org's page on that category.)

Gore can't take credit for the increased interest in climate change. Yoffe's assertions -- as unscientific as anything she accuses Gore of -- that children and her friends are scared of climate change and jarringly warm weather in the dead of winter and the big bad vice president and his slide show do make me wonder about what Gore wants out of his campaign. Yoffe doesn't bother with this. She doesn't even dabble in the question of whether Gore's scare tactics will lead to action -- or possibly is doing so right now. But I'll venture a guess. For sure, the initial blustering doom and gloom of "An Inconvenient Truth" was a response to years of shockingly bad public policy on the issue. It was also a polemic response to the fact that the debate had hit a brick wall in a blind alley: politicians interested in addressing climate change weren't in a position to do anything about it. Helplessness makes us lash out, and few people have earned a ration of feeling helpless like the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election.

Perhaps, then, it is time for the message to be repositioned somewhat. We're all scared, for sure, but now there are policymakers willing to listen to our concerns (though I'd steer clear of NASA). Maybe all Yoffe wanted was to point out it's time to stop scaring the children and maybe time to start working on the solution. She never gets there, sadly. Instead, Yoffe -- while accusing Gore of using scare tactics and pointing out the irony of Gore decrying the politics of fear -- is content to settle for scare tactics herself.