Twenty Years Later, 'An Inconvenient Truth' Has Been Thoroughly Debunked
Multiple Predictions From Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" Have Proven Completely False
While a different focus than my typical post, part of my goal with this Substack, and with all my work, is pointing out the risks of worshipping expertise.
Experts have their particular value, they can provide insights, information and data. They are also not infallible and they’re frequently unwilling to admit that they’ve made mistakes or were perhaps misguided about their views and ideas.
Which brings me to one of the most glaring examples of hubris and arrogance of a so-called “expert” getting things astronomically wrong.
It’s not an understatement to say that the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the direction of public policy. And in fact, that’s exactly what failed presidential candidate Al Gore intended the film to do. Fortunately for him, he found a willing audience of Hollywood celebrities and legacy media outlets to not only uncritically promote his ideology and activism, but to herald it unendingly.
Unfortunately for the former VP, author of the book the documentary is based on, 2006 is now far enough in the past that we can examine some of the predictions, claims, and statements of fact he makes in that film. So that’s exactly what we did.
It’s January 2026, almost 20 years after the film hit theaters and helped pave the way for Europe’s delusional “net zero” policies, electric car mandates, and low-flow showerheads. As a service to my readers, I’ve rewatched “An Inconvenient Truth” to see how well it held up over time. Spoiler alert: not particularly well!
The film starts off as a glowing tribute to Al Gore himself, an unsurprising beginning given his obvious ego and hubris. Almost immediately afterward, it jumps straight into the propaganda. He references Hurricane Katrina as an example of more extreme weather events in the modern world. There’s a “Simpsons” video with propaganda of “global warming,” remember, this is pre-rebrand to “climate change,” with a young girl seeing her ice cream cone melt. Gore discusses what introduced him to this field - that would be one professor who took some measurements of CO2, then made vague predictions of what would happen if we didn’t make changes.
Gore claims we started measuring CO2 in 1958, which, of course, thoroughly discredits his activism. Assuming the latest estimate is accurate, the earth is billions of years old. It keeps growing by the year, but as of January 2026, it’s 4.54 billion years. Sure, you can estimate CO2 concentrations for part of that past, but not all of it. Or even a sizable percentage of it. And making predictions and assumptions on such limited data is hardly science.
But ignoring the past and focusing on the future, one of his most concrete predictions of doom is in regard to Mt. Kilimanjaro. In his discussion, he shares photos of snow on the African mountain from decades ago, then images from the early 2000’s with much less snow. He blames this on global warming, then ominously predicts, “Within the decade there will be no more snows on Kilimanjaro.”
How’d that age?
READ THE LATEST:
