Al Gore’s False Prophecy

By Bjorn Lomborg

Thursday, March 19, 2026

 

Two decades have passed since Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, in May 2006, catapulting climate change into the global spotlight. The film, with its dramatic visuals and dire warnings, transformed the issue from a niche ecological concern into a front-page crisis. World leaders in rich countries began labeling it an “existential threat,” and it dominated international agendas. Gore’s message especially resonated with the elites who travel by private jet to attend global conferences, and it inspired a generation of influencers, activists, and policymakers.

 

As we approach the film’s 20th anniversary, it’s a time to reflect on not just its impact but its accuracy. The film’s predictions of escalating catastrophes have largely failed to materialize, its policy prescriptions have fallen short, and the $16 trillion currently spent in pursuit of its vision has delivered scant benefits. An Inconvenient Truth encapsulates the past two decades of climate debate: heavy on emotion and costs, light on evidence and benefits.

 

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Let’s start with the film’s core narrative: that climate change is driving ever-worsening disasters. Gore painted a picture of a world besieged by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, with humanity on the brink.

 

The data tell a different story. Over the past century, as the global population quadrupled, deaths from 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 more than 97 percent. This isn’t because disasters have vanished. It’s because wealthier, more resilient societies have adapted through better infrastructure, early warnings, and disaster management. Richer, smarter societies have made us dramatically safer, proving that adaptation and resilience work far better than alarmists suggest.

 

Gore’s movie famously warned of vanishing polar bears, using poignant computer-generated images to suggest they were drowning because of melting ice. Again, reality is starkly different: Polar bear populations have increased from around 12,000 in the 1960s to more than 26,000 today, according to the best available evidence, including from the Polar Bear Specialist Group under the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The primary historical threat was overhunting, not climate change. While future warming poses risks, the apocalyptic narrative is undermined by the data.

 

Hurricanes were another bogeyman. The film notably claimed that we would see more frequent and stronger storms; its poster cunningly showed a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. But global data from satellites actually show a slight decline in hurricane frequency since 1980. While Al Gore blamed Hurricane Katrina on climate change, just one year later, the U.S. began an unprecedentedly long streak of eleven years without major hurricane landfall. Indeed, the longest reliable data series for landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. has shown a decline since the year 1900, and major hurricanes are about as frequent as they were in the past. When adjusted for more people and more houses, the damages from U.S. hurricanes have declined, not increased.

 

Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Media hype suggests a planet ablaze, but global burned area has decreased by 25 percent since 2001, according to NASA data. Each year, the reduction spares from the flames an area larger than Texas and California combined.

 

In the U.S., while recent years have seen large fires, the 1930s Dust Bowl was five times worse. Fires are down everywhere else in the satellite era: They’re trending lower in Australia, Europe, and South America; Asia hit its third-lowest annual burned area, and Africa (the biggest burner by far) posted its all-time low in 2025. North America’s woes to a large extent stem from mismanagement: We’ve skipped the prescribed burns that lower long-term fire risk; a century of this fire suppression has built up undergrowth fuel and created tinderboxes. Yet this is spun as “climate change,” not policy failure.

 

Even CO2 emissions from wildfires are plummeting. The year 2025 saw the lowest-ever-recorded emissions in the satellite era, down 3 gigatons from early-2000s levels — equivalent to wiping out the annual emissions of Brazil and Indonesia combined. This undercuts the core argument that rising global temperatures are supercharging fires and feedback loops of carbon release.

 

This decline isn’t new; it’s a century-long pattern driven by human adaptation. People hate fires, so we prevent them. In the early 1900s, nearly 4 percent of global land burned yearly — two Indias’ worth. Today, it’s nearly halved, to 2.2 percent, sparing almost one India ablaze annually. Better land management, farming practices, and fire suppression have tamed blazes worldwide.

 

Air pollution from fires follows suit. Globally, reduced burning means cleaner air. The risk of death from fire-related pollution has dropped significantly, likely saving tens of thousands of lives yearly, especially among vulnerable infants.

 

Global fires are dramatically down, with lower emissions, pollution, and intensity — all facts that challenge the alarmism. In the wake of Gore’s film, media and activists have worked overtime to amplify every weather event as “unprecedented,” but the evidence shows that humanity is safer than ever from climate disasters. Climate change is real, but its impacts on extreme weather are dramatically overstated.

 

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Now consider the policy fallout. Gore’s call to action spurred trillions of dollars in spending to reduce emissions. Yet global fossil-fuel emissions have set records nearly every year since 2006, and they again set a record in 2025. Fossil fuels still dominate because countries want cheap and reliable power.

 

In 2006, the world got 82.6 percent of its total energy (not just electricity) from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Annual fossil-fuel consumption rose 26 percent between then and 2023, the last year with global data. Even though renewables had also grown spectacularly, the world was still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels delivering 81.1 percent of global energy. On current trends, it will take until the year 2708 to reach zero.

 

Gore explicitly claimed that the solutions to climate change were already at hand — especially solar and wind. Implementing these technologies swiftly and decisively, he said, required only sufficient political will from especially rich nations. This missed the fact that solar and wind are still not cheap and that much of the non-rich world has leaned even more into fossil fuels.

 

Although solar and wind technologies have become dramatically cheaper in recent years, they remain fundamentally intermittent: They generate power only when the sun shines or the wind blows, not satisfying demand around the clock. Modern societies require reliable, 24/7 electricity, which means any heavy reliance on renewables necessitates substantial backup systems — typically fossil-fuel plants (like natural gas) that can ramp up quickly to fill the gaps during extended periods of low generation. People think that batteries can play a large role, but almost everywhere, we have battery backup for just tens of minutes, whereas weeks or months would be needed — which would entail a prohibitive cost.

 

The result is that citizens and economies end up paying nearly twice. While we save on fossil-fuel costs, we have to pay once for the renewables themselves (including their installation, grid integration, and subsidies) and again for the reliable backup infrastructure that will keep the lights on.

 

(International Energy Agency, Statista)

 

Studies examining real-world grids in places such as China, Germany, and Texas show that, after properly accounting for these backup costs, the true all-in price of solar and wind power often turns out to be significantly higher than claimed — sometimes twice as expensive as coal, and many times more than fossil fuels when reliability is factored in.

 

We’re constantly bombarded with the narrative that solar and wind are the cheapest energy sources around — an idea that Gore did much to sell. But look at the real-world data: As nations ramp up their share of these intermittent renewables, electricity prices soar. Countries such as Denmark and Germany, for instance, get more than 40 percent of their power from solar and wind, but they face electricity costs double or triple those in China or the U.S., which use these renewables far less.

 

And it turns out that even China, which is often rumored to be going green, is really overwhelmingly fossil-fuel-based. The solar panels and wind turbines China sells the rest of the world are mostly made with fossil fuels.

 

An Inconvenient Truth’s naïve framing — that we already possess affordable, scalable solutions and merely lack the resolve to deploy them — ignored these practical engineering and economic realities.

 

Estimates vary, but climate policies since 2006 have cost more than $16 trillion globally, including subsidies, regulations, and infrastructure. In the U.S. alone, the Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds of billions into green tech. Yet emissions climb because the rich world’s efforts ignore the developing world’s realities. Here’s the crux: An Inconvenient Truth focused on what rich countries should do: cut emissions drastically. But rich nations (OECD countries) will account for only about 13 percent of remaining 21st-century emissions. Emerging giants including China, India, and Africa drive the rest. Even if all rich countries achieved net-zero by mid-century, it would avert less than 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100, using the U.N. climate panel’s own model. That’s negligible.

 

This missing sense of proportion from Al Gore continues to stoke climate agitation, with activists happily glueing themselves to roads and vandalizing paintings in the U.S. and Europe, blaming Western countries for not reducing their carbon footprint enough. Meanwhile, the agitators ignore the real elephants in the room.

 

As other global challenges — poverty, disease, education — demand attention, the costs of climate policy must be weighed. The best economic evidence suggests that unmitigated warming might shave 2–3 percent off global GDP by 2100. That’s not trivial, but context matters: Under baseline growth, the average person’s income globally would rise 450 percent by this century’s end; taking into account the impact of climate change, it would feel as if that person would be “only” 435 percent richer. We’re talking about being vastly richer, just slightly less so.

 

Current net-zero policies, however, are fantastically expensive with minimal benefits. One set of analyses pegs global net-zero costs at $27 trillion annually across the 21st century, yielding just $4.5 trillion in annual avoided damages. That means for every dollar spent on today’s climate policies, we waste over 80 cents.

 

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Where Gore’s movie failed most was in neglecting to make the case for smarter approaches. Instead of panic-driven mandates, we need to prioritize innovation. R&D into green tech — better batteries, advanced nuclear, carbon capture — could slash costs, making a transition affordable or even desirable for all. Adaptation saves lives cheaply: seawalls, drought-resistant crops, early warnings. And finally, development lifts billions out of poverty, building resilience.

 

If we’re actually going to tackle climate change, we will need to pivot from Gore’s alarmist playbook to evidence-based strategies that deliver results. Central to this is ramping up innovation through green research and development. History shows that humanity solves big problems not by rationing or banning but by inventing breakthroughs. We didn’t end air pollution by banning cars; we innovated the catalytic converter. Hunger wasn’t curbed by telling people to eat less; it was the Green Revolution — developing and spreading high-yield crop varieties alongside modern inputs like synthetic fertilizers, irrigation, and improved farming techniques — that dramatically boosted harvests and helped feed billions.

 

But governments have neglected climate R&D for decades. In the 1980s, rich countries spent nearly 8 cents per $100 of GDP on low-carbon tech. Today, it’s less than 4 cents. Nations promised to double this in 2015 but fell far short. Economists, including Nobel laureates, estimate that boosting global green R&D to $100 billion annually — still far less than the $2.3 trillion spent on green energy last year — could make future decarbonization cheap enough for everyone, including the developing world. This would accelerate advancements in fission, fusion, advanced geothermal, and efficient storage, outpacing the costly rollout of current, inefficient renewables.

 

Adaptation must complement innovation, as it’s often the most cost-effective way to build resilience and save lives and livelihoods. We’re already adapting successfully, which is why wildfire deaths are down; flood deaths have likewise plummeted with adaptation and warnings. In low-lying nations such as Bangladesh, cyclone mortality has fallen sharply with shelters and better forecasts: from the global record death toll of more than 300,000 in 1970 to fewer than 200 dead per year since 2008. Investing in resilient infrastructure — such as the Netherlands’ seawalls, which protect against rises far beyond current projections, or adaptations like drought-resistant seeds — could avert damages at a fraction of mitigation costs. Adaptation gets just a fraction of climate funding, overshadowed by a drive for cuts in emissions that yield tiny temperature benefits.

 

Finally, we need to prioritize development to build inherent resilience. Poverty is the real killer in disasters: A hurricane hitting rich Florida causes economic damage but few deaths, while the same hurricane hitting poor Haiti will kill hundreds and devastate the economy.

 

Lifting billions out of poverty through education, health, and economic growth creates societies that can withstand warming. Much more important, such advances also create huge humanitarian and quality-of-life benefits. In Africa and Asia, where emissions will surge, affordable energy fuels this progress; forcing expensive green energy will stall progress. Gore’s vision ignored all these factors; 20 years later, it’s time to embrace them.

 

Climate policy must ultimately serve people, especially the billions facing poverty, hunger, and preventable disease. Green policies can help a tiny bit, though they come at a huge cost, but the greatest threats to human welfare remain those immediate killers. We should allocate our limited resources in proportion to how effectively they can mitigate suffering — tackling malaria, malnutrition, and lack of access to basic energy first, while advancing clean innovations that make reliable power affordable for everyone. This shift in focus, particularly in the world’s poorest places, will create far more resilient societies than rigid emissions targets alone ever could.

 

Two decades on, An Inconvenient Truth reminds us that claiming to care about the planet and future generations is not enough. Alarmism has cost trillions but achieved little. We need to embrace the evidence: Climate change is a challenge, not a catastrophe. And there are cost-effective solutions such as innovation, adaptation, and development, even if they are not as morally satisfying as the exhortations in Gore’s movie.