When An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, it was not presented as a speculative documentary.  It was framed as settled science and a moral imperative; pretty heady stuff considering the source.  Al Gore did not merely argue that climate change deserved attention, he argued that policy intervention was urgent, unavoidable, and beyond debate.

“Beyond debate,” should have been the tipoff – nonetheless, the UN, the Left in general, and even American presidents, led by a 15-year-old Swedish school girl listened as if her words came from the ‘burning bush.’  Meanwhile, the Chinese had a good old-fashioned belly-laugh as they sold the West billions in solar panels and windmills.

Energy systems were restructured, regulations multiplied, and costs passed downstream to ordinary citizens—all justified by the film’s predictions.  Nearly twenty years later, those predictions have seasoned and the world learned that bad forecasts don’t stay theoretical; they shape policy, prices, and lives.

Gore’s theory rests primarily on atmospheric CO₂ measurements, just one of the hundreds of distinct factors that affect Earth’s climate, not to mention the dozens of major drivers and other secondary and interacting influences.

And this is where we entered the theater of the absurd.  The baseline for these measurements was the year 1958.  However, when contrasted against Earth’s 4.54-billion-year climate history, that record represents 0.0000015% of the time planet earth has been in existence or roughly 1.3 milliseconds out of a 24-hour day.

Gore’s doom and gloom predictions were not vague – they were concrete and egregiously wrong.  That I have to enumerate even a few of these is almost an embarrassment, to wit: Gore warned that the snowcap on Kilimanjaro would disappear within the decade.  Two decades later you could ski down Kilimanjaro if they had ski patrol, meanwhile, local guides report that visitors motivated by Gore’s predictions are shocked to find the amount of snow present.

Gore famously declared that within 15 years Glacier National Park would become “the park formerly known as Glacier.”  By 2020 the National Park Service was removing signs predicting glacial disappearance.  He spoke of CO2 levels in parts per million (ppm) giving the illusion of serious science for the ill-informed, and suddenly people who couldn’t convert Centigrade to Fahrenheit were climate experts.

I could go on, but why bother – the entire premise of the book and movie is a fabrication akin to Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.   And non-scientific among us, no science is EVER settled, something every scientist from Newton to Einstein to Hawking understands.  Gore relied on individual weather events as proof of climate collapse – hurricane frequency, drought intensity, wildfire regularity, etc.  Remember those “rising sea levels?”  Last week I was watching a Netflix documentary about New York City with images from more than 100 years ago;  interestingly, the water level around Liberty Island in NY Harbor was the same then as it is today – go figure!

But if the predictions don’t undermine the film’s credibility, the behavior of its advocates does.  Gore condemns fossil-fuel consumption while maintaining a globe-spanning lecture circuit.   He quotes, without irony, that “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it”—a description that fits the climate-industrial complex far better than its critics.  It’s the age-old rationale of the Left, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

The celebrities and political elites who amplified the message made no meaningful changes to their own lifestyles.  Private jets, oceanfront mansions, and energy-intensive consumption remained untouched.  Sacrifice was always for other people—particularly those with less income and fewer alternatives, e.g., Barack and Michelle Obama own waterfront homes on Martha’s Vineyard, Oahu, Hawaii; and rent a third on special occasions.

But the most damaging legacy of An Inconvenient Truth is economic and social.  Energy policies justified by the film have led to higher electricity prices, less reliable grids, and reduced energy availability, especially in Europe.  Germany offers the clearest example: hundreds of billions invested in renewable energy, grid capacity doubled, yet electricity output declined and prices rose to roughly three times U.S. levels.  Energy poverty increased.  Industrial competitiveness declined and ordinary households paid the price.

Similar outcomes followed elsewhere.  Intermittent energy sources required fossil-fuel backups. Manufacturing costs rose.  Heating and transportation became more expensive.  And the burden fell hardest on lower-income populations for whom energy is not discretionary.

The problem with An Inconvenient Truth was that it was predicated on ideological speculation and its predictions were sold as inevitabilities.  When forecasts collapsed there was no- c’mon, has anyone ever heard Gore apologize?

Meanwhile, as a practical matter, the most inconvenient truth is this: public policy was reshaped by failed predictions, enforced by elites unwilling to live under the rules they imposed, and paid for by ordinary people through higher costs and less reliable energy.