Energy

10 Years Later, Al Gore Says His Film ‘Underestimated’ Global Warming

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Michael Bastasch DCNF Managing Editor
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Former Vice President Al Gore told The Hollywood Reporter his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” actually underestimated how serious global warming would be — despite all the patently false predictions he made in the film.

“I wish the film had over-estimated the seriousness of the crisis, but unfortunately it actually underestimated how serious it is,” Gore told THR in an interview Thursday, just days before the 10th anniversary of his film.

“But on the positive side, solutions are now being developed so quickly that there is real cause for hope and optimism,” Gore said.

Gore’s 2006 film claimed global warming was the greatest challenge facing mankind, and that human-produced carbon dioxide emissions were pushing the Earth towards an ecological disaster. The film even won Gore and his crew two Oscars in 2007, and the movie revitalized Gore’s political relevance.

But did Gore’s film actually “underestimate” the seriousness of global warming? The Daily Caller News Foundation re-watched “An Inconvenient Truth” in early May to see how well his predictions fared after a decade.

Our conclusion: Gore is still alarmingly wrong.

TheDCNF pointed out Gore’s top five failed predictions (there were more, we just didn’t want to publish a novel). Some of his more famous predictions, including that Mount Kilimanjaro would have no snow by 2016, were hilariously incorrect — and, yes, Kilimanjaro still has snow.

But that didn’t stop Gore from playing up his film’s success when interviewed by THR. For example, Gore bragged about his expertise on the connection between global warming and extreme weather.

“All 50 of the state insurance commissioners were meeting in New Orleans and had invited me to make a presentation on the linkage between hurricanes and the climate crisis,” he said. “It was scheduled for the very day that Hurricane Katrina ended up slamming into New Orleans.”

Those insurance commissioners probably regret paying Gore to explain global warming to them since there’s not a lot of evidence global warming has caused the weather to become more extreme.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) data doesn’t even support Gore’s claim. The IPCC found in 2013 there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.”

The IPCC also found “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” and “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

Gore should take these findings seriously since he shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 with the IPCC for raising awareness about global warming.

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