Two decades ago, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth thrust climate change into the global spotlight. With dramatic imagery and dire warnings, it transformed a niche concern into a front-page crisis, influencing leaders of rich countries and elite jet-setters, and inspiring a generation of activists.
Twenty years affords distance to reflect not just on the film’s impact but also its accuracy. Many of Gore’s most alarming predictions have failed to materialise, while the policy response it helped inspire has proven extraordinarily flawed.
The film’s core narrative was that climate change is driving ever-worsening disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms and wildfires. Yet over the past century, even as the global population quadrupled, deaths from these climate-related disasters have plummeted.
In the 1920s an average of almost half a million people died annually from such events. Today that number is under 10,000 — a decline of over 97%. Richer, smarter societies have made us dramatically safer, proving adaptation and resilience work far better than alarmism suggests.
The film claimed we would see more frequent and stronger hurricanes because of climate change, with the movie poster literally showing a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. Global data actually shows a slight decline in both hurricane frequency and their total energy since comprehensive satellite data started in 1980.
Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Globally, annual burnt area has decreased by more than 25% over the past quarter century, according to Nasa data. While recent years have seen large US fires because of forest mismanagement, the 1930s Dust Bowl era was five times worse. Fires are down on all other continents.
The film famously highlighted polar bears as a symbol of impending ecological collapse, suggesting they were drowning due to melting ice. In reality, polar bear populations have more than doubled, from about 12,000 in the 1960s to more than 26,000 today. The primary historical threat was hunting, not climate change, and Gore’s claims have simply turned out to be wrong 20 years later.
Gore’s call to action spurred expensive emissions reductions. Yet fossil fuel consumption keeps increasing because cheap and reliable power drives growth, and global emissions have set records nearly every year since 2006.
We’re nowhere near a green transition. In 2006 the world got 82.6% of its total energy (not just electricity) from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2023, the latest year with global data, the share was 81.1%. On this slow trend it will take more than six centuries to get to zero. Yet Gore’s message was explicit: climate solutions were already at hand, needing only political will from rich nations to implement them swiftly and decisively.
Though solar and wind technologies have become dramatically cheaper, they remain fundamentally intermittent: they generate power only when the sun shines or the wind blows. Modern societies require reliable, 24/7 electricity, which necessitates substantial backup systems — typically fossil-fuel plants. People think batteries can play a large role, but almost everywhere we have battery backup for less than tens of minutes.
The result is that we end up paying twice: once for renewables and again for reliable backup infrastructure. The film’s wilfully naïve framing ignored these engineering and economic realities.
The cost of climate policies since 2006 has exceeded $16-trillion globally. In the US alone, the Inflation Reduction Act poured hundreds of billions into green tech. Yet emissions climb because the rich world’s efforts ignore the reality that developing nations require cheap and reliable energy to reduce poverty.
Rich nations account for only 13% of the remaining 21st-century emissions. Emerging giants like China, India and Africa drive the rest. Even if all rich countries achieved net-zero by midcentury, it would avert less than 0.1°C of warming by 2100, using the UN climate panel’s own model.
Gore’s apocalyptic climate predictions have aged poorly. While climate change is a real problem, the best evidence suggests warming might shave 2%-3% off global GDP by 2100. Context matters: the UN estimates that by century’s end the average person will be 450% as rich as today. With climate impacts, they would “only” be 435% as rich. We’re talking about being vastly better off, just slightly less so.
The movie’s biggest blunder was to fail to make the case for smarter approaches. We need to prioritise innovation. Green tech research and development — to achieve better batteries, advanced nuclear, fusion — could slash costs to make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Adaptation saves lives cheaply: sea walls, drought-resistant crops, early warnings. And development lifts billions out of poverty, building resilience.
Two decades on, An Inconvenient Truth reminds us that panic is a terrible policy adviser. Focusing on cost-effective solutions — innovation, adaptation, development — will save trillions and do far more to help both people and the climate.
- Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and author of “False Alarm” and “Best Things First”.
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