20 Years After ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

Jan. 24 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of Al Gore’s alarmist global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Gore has surfed the movie and climate alarmism to a net worth estimated at $300 million and a Nobel Peace Prize.

But the rest of us have been saddled with: (1) a hoax that has debased the field of science; (2) an energy scam that has cost the world more than $10-20 trillion dollars and threatens our national security; and (3) a political power grab that has reduced our freedoms.

Gore’s movie was junk from the get-go. I attended a meeting in early January 2006 where Gore presented the slide show that was the basis for the movie to a group of conservatives at a weekly meeting sponsored by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. After the presentation, I approached Gore and asked if he was interested in participating in some sort of debate about his claims. Although he said he was interested, his staff later declined.

The movie premiered weeks later at the Sundance Film Festival, and the rest is history. And here’s what that history is.

The “documentary” was initially a hit, grossing $50 million in theaters. Problematically, though, the film soon became part of many secondary school curriculums. Its credibility took a major hit in 2007 when a British court ruled that the movie could not be shown to school children without a warning label about its factual errors.

As I noted in a FOX news column at the time, the judge ruled that Gore’s claims about global warming drying up Lake Chad, causing polar bears to drown while being forced to swim farther for food; and shutting down the Gulf Stream were false and/or impossible. Based on the judge’s ruling, I estimated that “the footage that ought to be excised adds up to about 25 minutes or so out of the 98-minute film. What’s left is largely Gore personal drama and cinematic fluff that has nothing to do with the science of climate change.”

Despite the embarrassing ruling, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that December. His acceptance speech doubled down on the movie claims and added a few more. None of his predictions came true.

His most well-known prediction was that the Arctic might be ice-free during the summer of 2014. But at its 2025 summer minimum, the Arctic still had more than 5 million square kilometers of sea ice — about the same as in 2007. His lesser-known but equally erroneous predictions relate to global temperature, drought and glaciers, agriculture, wildfires, hurricanes, deforestation, and species extinction.

Al Gore inspired former-Marxist-turned-normal-person film director Martin Durkin to produce a counter to “An Inconvenient Truth” called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” that I also reviewed in a FOX News column. Though Gore dodged my debate challenge, I was able to make him “debate” by splicing together clips from Gore’s movie with opposing experts from Durkin’s film. Though now blocked for copyright claims, this “debate” can still be found on YouTube.

After all these years, the one thing Gore has been partially correct about is this: At the beginning of the United Nation’s COP-27 meeting in Egypt in 2022, Gore said “We have a credibility problem, all of us: We’re talking and we’re starting to act, but we’re not doing enough.” He’s correct about his credibility problem. It’s never gone away.

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.com

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.