What Al Gore got right – and wrong – in An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth made dramatic claims about the future of the planet. Fifteen years on from the film’s release, how do those predictions look? Experts give their verdict.

Australians tend to remember 2006 with singular clarity, because it was a bloody scorcher. It was our driest year on record, a grim marker for a country in the grip of a drought that, three years earlier, had already been classified our worst ever.

The year started on an ominous note in Sydney, with January 1 temperatures peaking at a brutal 45C after 4pm, and lingering for hours thereafter. New year hangovers were shown no mercy.

John Howard was Prime Minister back then. iPhones and Instagram did not exist. Few had heard of Facebook or Twitter.

In the cinemas the breakout smash was a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Others lapped up the rapid twists of The Da Vinci Code.

But the most talked-about film of 2006 was a virtual monologue.

Al Gore’s global warming slide show An Inconvenient Truth was a box office hit and the winner of two Academy Awards. The sombre warnings from the man who “used to be the next president of the United States” turbocharged global awareness about the causes and effects of climate change.

Climate scientist and farmer Dr Anika Molesworth, whose book A Sunburnt Country will be published in August. Picture: Supplied

Broken Hill farmer and agricultural scientist Dr Anika Molesworth was 19 when the film came out, and despite her initial reservations (“I didn’t want to watch a film about the weather”), it had a profound effect on her.

“I hadn’t really grasped the term of climate change, and this film presented it in a way that was really easy to understand, and what it meant for people and the planet,” Dr Molesworth said.

“I think at the time, I assumed the adults were getting on with addressing this problem.”

A subsequent realisation this was not happening spurred her into action. She is now the Deputy Chair of Farmers for Climate Action, and her forthcoming book Our Sunburnt Country explores how climate change is impacting on Australian farmers.

Fifteen years on, Dr Molesworth describes An Inconvenient Truth as “pivotal”, but for other viewers, how do Al Gore’s grim predictions look now? Have his prognostications of doom been vindicated?

Al Gore in a scene from his documentary |An Inconvenient Truth. Picture: AP Photo/Paramount Classics/Eric Lee

In a few examples, no.

Gore predicted “within a decade” there would be no more snow on Africa’s Mt Kilimanjaro. But snow remains.

He suggested Canada’s Glacier National Park would “need to be renamed within 15 years” because the glaciers would all be gone. But some are still there.

And he claimed that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to melt, the sea level worldwide “would go up 20 feet” (six metres).

But according to a new Chinese and American study, ice coverage in the Southern Hemisphere has actually expanded over the past few decades, mainly in the Ross Sea around Antarctica. (But don’t get too excited, climate sceptics: the study found while Southern Hemisphere ice was increasing at the rate of 14,000 square kilometres annually, more than seven times that amount was melting in the Northern Hemisphere every year.)

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a Future Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW. Picture: Supplied

Dr Pep Canadell is a chief research scientist in CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, and the Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project. Picture: Supplied

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who specialises in extreme weather events at UNSW’s Climate Research Centre, said Gore was not the only environmental advocate who had ever made incorrect short-term predictions.

“We’ve learnt a lot in 15 years about putting short time frames on things,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

“You can have variability on a year to year timescale. We know that one year might have coolish temperatures but the next year might be record breaking. You can’t just focus on one particular factoid or one particular year or one particular temperature in one location; you have to look at the overall picture over a long time frame to truly see what’s going on, and as climate scientists that’s exactly what we do.”

One of the trends Gore most accurately warned viewers about was the rise in global temperatures, Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

In one of the most powerful sequences of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed the 10 warmest years on record had all occurred in the previous 14 years, and 2005 was the hottest of them all.

“But now 2005 is our tenth hottest year,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. “2020 and 2016 are roughly tied for the hottest year on record, then 2019, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2014, 2010, 2013 and 2005. So 2005 has been overshadowed easily in the past 15 years.”

An elephant in Ambosei National Park, Kenya, with a snow-covered Mount Kilimanjaro in the background.

Gore’s warnings about the “relentless” rate of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere were also accurate, Dr Pep Canadell from the CSIRO said.

“Carbon emissions have continued to grow non-stop,” he said. “What Gore said, the prophecy has come true.”

While global CO2 emissions dipped from 43 billion tonnes in 2019 to 37 billion tonnes in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr Canadell said, “This year we will see a rebound effect, as we did after the GFC.”

More of Gore’s warnings are being borne out by scientific observation, Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

Stronger, more destructive storms? Tick. (“Category 3, 4 and 5 cyclones have increased by 10 per cent in the past 40 years.”)

Shrinking glaciers? Tick. (“Name your country; it’s happening. A couple in Switzerland have disappeared completely.”)

Melting Arctic ice? Tick. (“When An Inconvenient Truth was filmed, the ice coverage was roughly 6 million square kilometres in September, and now we’re sitting at just under 4 million square kilometres.”)

A polar bear in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The mighty animals have become a symbol of what we might lose under climate change.

And the biggie: rising sea levels? Tick. (“We’ve seen sea level rise of about 24 centimetres since 1880, and since 1993 it’s been about 8-9 cm. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s going to accelerate more as massive glaciers melt,” Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.)

The 15 year anniversary of Gore’s documentary comes as the world reels from more and more instances of weather gone wild, with temperatures in British Columbia last week reaching an intolerable 49.6 degrees.

Australia’s records have been broken time and again. 2019 supplanted 2006 as our driest year ever; a 48.9 degree day in Western Sydney in January 2020 made that 45 degree scorcher from January 1, 2006 seem like a picnic in comparison.

Climate scientist Professor Will Steffen. Picture: Gary Ramage

Professor Will Steffen from the Climate Council said if Al Gore were doing another film today, he would not need to rely on projections.

“Obviously not all of (Gore’s) projections were right. Many of them were, but I think the film engaged many people in ways that scientists don’t,” he said.

“Things have changed a lot in 15 years. We depend much less now on projections, and much more on what’s unfolding in real time, which is probably even more frightening. We see things changing around us all the time now. We’ve been through the bushfires, we’ve seen the Great Barrier Reef bleaching, the Canadians are suffering with incredible heat in Vancouver. [An Inconvenient Truth] was a good piece of communication at the time, but now the real world is communicating even better than Al Gore did.”