Two decades ago, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth thrust climate change into the global spotlight. With dramatic imagery and dire warnings, it transformed a niche concern into a front-page crisis, influencing leaders in rich countries and elite jet-setters, and inspiring a generation of activists. [some emphasis, links added]
Twenty years affords distance to reflect not just on the film’s impact but also its accuracy. Many of Gore’s most alarming predictions have failed to materialize, while the policy response it helped inspire has proven extraordinarily flawed.
The film’s core narrative was that climate change is driving ever-worsening disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires.
Yet, over the past century, even as the global population quadrupled, deaths from these climate-related disasters have plummeted. In the 1920s, an average of nearly half a million people died annually from such events.
Today, that number is under 10,000—a decline of over 97 percent. Richer, smarter societies have made us dramatically safer, proving adaptation and resilience work far better than alarmism suggests.
The film claimed we would see more frequent and stronger hurricanes because of climate change, with the movie poster literally showing a hurricane coming out of a smokestack.
Global data show a slight decline in hurricane frequency and total energy since comprehensive satellite data began in 1980.
Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Globally, annual burned area has decreased by more than 25 percent over the past quarter-century, according to NASA data.
While recent years have seen large wildfires in the United States because of poor forest mismanagement, the 1930s Dust Bowl era was five times worse. Fires are down on all other continents.
The film famously highlighted polar bears as a symbol of impending ecological collapse, suggesting they were drowning from melting ice. In reality, polar bear populations have more than doubled from around 12,000 in the 1960s to over 26,000 today.
Meteorologist reacts to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary, which was released 20 years ago today.pic.twitter.com/3CDc5gFRjS
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) May 25, 2026
The primary historical threat was hunting, not climate change, and Gore’s claims, now 20 years later, have simply turned out to be wrong.
Gore’s call to action spurred expensive emissions reductions. Yet fossil fuel consumption keeps increasing because cheap, reliable power drives growth, and global emissions have set records nearly every year since 2006.
We’re nowhere near a green transition.
In 2006, the world got 82.6 percent of its total energy (not just electricity) from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2023, the last year with global data, the share was 81.1 percent.
On this slow trend, it will take over six centuries to get to zero.
Yet, Gore’s message was explicit: climate solutions were already at hand, needing only political will from rich nations to implement them swiftly and decisively.
Although solar and wind technologies have become dramatically cheaper, they remain fundamentally intermittent: they generate power only when the sun shines or the wind blows.
Modern societies require reliable, 24/7 electricity, necessitating substantial backup systems—typically fossil fuel plants.
People think batteries can play a large role, but almost everywhere, we have battery backup for less than ten minutes.
The result is that we end up paying twice: once for renewables and again for reliable backup infrastructure. The film’s willfully naive framing ignored these engineering and economic realities.
Read rest at Newsweek
