It’s been 10 years since Al Gore released his film “An Inconvenient Truth” that reinvigorated the eco-left and brought the issue of global warming to American homes.
Unfortunately for Gore, as the years go by not only are many of his film’s predictions wrong, but Gore’s own view of man-made warming becomes more alarmist while the science suggests otherwise.
“Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, but the future of human civilization is at stake,” Gore said in an exclusive interview with WIRED on the 10th anniversary of his Oscar-winning film.
“Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences that could utterly disrupt the future of human civilization,” Gore said of what needs to be done to fight global warming. “It means bending the curves downward so that the global warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphere and begins to reduce in volume.”
For Gore, fighting global warming means completely reorganizing society so we virtually create no emissions when generating electricity, traveling or even turning on our appliances.
“It means creating tens of millions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transform energy systems and install advanced batteries, to transform agriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of our civilization,” Gore said.
But Gore’s solution to global warming is base on a catastrophic outlook that human greenhouse gas emissions will drastically increase temperatures and cause an ecological catastrophe. Does climate science support this view?
For starters, Gore’s 2006 film came out smack dab in the middle of the so-called global warming “hiatus” — a period of about 15 years with no significant warming. Gore promised global warming was “uninterrupted and intensifying.” That’s not exactly what happened.
The hiatus, or “slow down” as some have called it, in warming has forced scientists to go back and rethink the climate models they used to predict ever-rising global temperatures.
“The bottom line is that global surface temperature experienced a warming slowdown over the early-2000s, and this slowdown was at odds with our expectation from most climate model simulations,” wrote John Fyfe, a Canadian climate modeler and author of a recent commentary on the hiatus.
