Table of Contents
A lie, as the saying goes, gets halfway around the world before the truth even gets its boots on. The legacy media know this only too well: in fact, it’s been their operating model for the last couple of decades, which is hardly surprising, given how well it’s worked for them and their puppetmasters. How many people do you know, after all, who still believe with absolute conviction in ‘Russiagate’ or ‘Very Fine People’?
Propaganda may not fool all of the people all of the time, but it sure fools a helluva lot for a long time. Take Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It’s hard to believe the movie is almost as old as the Swedish Doom Goblin it did so much to inspire. This begs the question: have its scary predictions held up as badly as hers?
This is not just about ‘I Told You So’ snarking. It’s about holding the scaremongers accountable for the results of their lies and distortions. Governments around the globe have already spent trillions of other people’s money on ‘climate action’. The result has mostly been misery and not a jot of difference to the climate. No serious person denies that the climate changes. The question has always been what to do about it and whether the medicine will kill the patient. Scaremongering has never been the way to good public policy. Nobody makes sound decisions in a state of manufactured panic.
Gore’s Malthusian ramblings, delivered in a robotic and moralizing tone, also won him a Nobel Peace Prize. Worse, over the next decade, teachers across the country played the movie, crammed with pseudoscientific charts and cartoonish satellite images – water transformed into fire – to terrify children. Miami and New York would be submerged under the ocean, the movie warned. The Arctic ice cap would disappear by the summer of 2014. Glacier National Park? It would be glacier-free by 2020. It told us that there would be no more Snows of Kilimanjaro. None of which came true.
Indeed, 20 years on, Gore’s film looks nothing like sober science and stands exposed for what it always was: deceitful agitprop. The central claim that weather-related disasters would explode in frequency and lethality has also failed. All extreme weather now accounts for roughly 0.1 deaths for every 100,000 people in the United States each year. More people die mining cobalt for electric car batteries in Africa.
Hurricanes were the film’s poster-child catastrophe. Literally: one is shown unfurling from an industrial smokestack on the movie poster. In the 20 years since, a grand total of 301 Americans died due to hurricanes, an average of 15 a year. More people get shot at the average weekend barbecue in Chicago.
As it happened, Florida didn’t get hit with another major hurricane for over a decade, and Louisiana didn’t see one for 14 years.
Even if they had been more common, of course, we have always lived with hurricanes. From 1851 to 1860, the year the first combustion engine was sold, 16 hurricanes made landfall in the US, four of them major. From 1860 to 1960, we experienced anywhere from four to seven major hurricanes making landfall every decade. From 1960 to 2024, we experienced anywhere from four to seven major hurricanes making landfall every decade. Last year, for the first time in a decade, not a single hurricane made landfall in the US.
Alarmists will tell you that the “hurricane drought” was also caused by climate change, because, for a while there, everything was blamed on climate change, including heart disease, asthma, substance abuse, mental wellness, prostitution, war, diabetes, migraines, dementia, Islamic terrorism, crime, and income inequality.
Right on time for Gore’s lying propaganda’s 20th anniversary, the United Nations has now quietly dropped RCP 8.5, the worst-case emissions pathway that underpinned so much of the doomsday modelling. It is, they now admit, “implausible”.
But, like the indefatigable cultists of the famous End of the World sketch, the climate cult simply reset the clock. In 2007 the head of the UN climate panel declared that without action before 2012 “that’s too late”. In 2018 the UN General Assembly president told delegates that mankind was “in danger of disappearing” inside an 11-year window. Both deadlines passed without the predicted apocalypse.
Global emissions from fossil fuels are running higher than the early-2000s models assumed, largely because China now emits more than the United States and European Union combined. The main reason American emissions have fallen is the shift from coal to natural gas, a transition environmentalists, including Gore, long opposed.
The real damage was never to the climate. It was to public debate and rational policy. Dissenting scientists such as meteorologist Bill Gray or economist Bjorn Lomborg were smeared as cranks and industry shills. Gray predicted a modest warming of roughly 0.3°C over coming decades. Actual measured warming since 2006 has been around 0.35°C. He was closer to the mark than the catastrophists who treated every weather event as proof of imminent doom.
On the other hand, Gore and his imitators were never held to account for the string of failed predictions. The film won an Oscar and helped secure Gore a Nobel Peace Prize. Schools showed it to children for years. The same media outlets that amplified every red line now treat the subject as settled and move on to the next moral panic. Gore is no more likely to return his Nobel in shame than the New York Times will the Pulitzer it won for printing Walter Duranty’s blatant lies.
Good policy requires clear eyes and steady nerves. Panic is a poor basis for remaking energy systems, agriculture or transport. Adaptation, technological progress and measured responses have always served humanity better than apocalyptic deadlines that keep being extended. Twenty years after An Inconvenient Truth, the central lesson remains the same: scaremongering may win awards and prizes, but it produces lousy decisions.
