Former Vice President Al Gore is still making climate doom predictions, 20 years after his warnings from An Inconvenient Truth proved false — this time invoking the science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow for a rapt Hollywood audience.
Gore joined the first-ever Sustainability in Entertainment Honors event Thursday, organized by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, for a keynote conversation with The West Wing star Bradley Whitford. The pair reminisced about the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, conspicuously omitting its failed prophecy that Earth’s ecosystems would reach a “tipping point” of no return, thanks to human industrial activity, in only ten years. That deadline that came and went a full decade ago.
In the course of the conversation, Gore mentioned that the idea for An Inconvenient Truth came out of his promotion for the 2004 science fiction movie The Day After Tomorrow (throughout the keynote, Gore mixed its title up with the 1983 nuclear war thriller The Day After). The mansion-dwelling, private–jetting climate crusader later invoked the disaster film, saying that the calamity it depicts is “a very real threat within the next 25 years.”
Conveniently, Gore — now 78 years old — will have likely passed away from old age by the time such a prediction, just like its predecessors, does not come to pass.
In response to this doomsday warning, Whitford sets a more drastic timeline — that if Gore’s energy policies are not enacted, “we’re in an ice age in, like, 10 years.” However, Gore punts the prophecy’s deadline much farther into the future, dodging any chance of accountability.
GORE: That movie that I mentioned, The Day After about the Gulf Stream shutting down, well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years.
WHITFORD: Right. And for people that don’t remember from the movie, you talked very explicitly about if the Greenland ice shelf melts to a certain point, which seems probable, given what happened in Antarctica-
GORE: And Greenland today, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour, night and day.WHITFORD: And if there is a tipping point here where the gradual threat of climate change becomes immediate, where — if that happens and the Gulf Stream ceases to exist as we know it, we’re in an ice age in, like, 10 years.
GORE: No, no, no. It would take longer — it, I mean, I’m not the expert-WHITFORD: [Crosstalk] I wear makeup, Al.
GORE: But I’ve spent a lot of time with them. But it would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond our, anything we can compare it to today.
An Inconvenient Truth made a number of specific predictions that proved false. Gore stated the Arctic Ocean could lose all of its summer ice by 2013 — seven years after the film’s release. He fretted that Mount Kilimanjaro could lose all its snow by 2015. He forecast that global sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet “in the near future,” complete with visualizations of New York City and Miami underwater.
In a recent interview with The Bulwark, Gore insisted that the film’s warnings “were proven dead right.”
The Sustainability in Entertainment Honors is a “celebration of Hollywood environmentalism,” with executives representing Netflix, CAA, the Television Academy, and more talking about how they hope to spread the bad news of climate doom without being hypocrites through excessive consumption.
Stephen Markley, writer on the Hulu series Paradise, whined in an award speech: “Even after 16,000 homes in our home city burned to the ground, I can tell you from experience, it’s never been harder to get something greenlit about the climate crisis.”
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