The Inconvenient Truth About "An Inconvenient Truth" This Sunday marks 20 years since Al Gore told us the world was ending. So how'd that work out?

This Sunday, May 24th, you're going to fire up the grill, crack something cold, and enjoy a Memorial Day weekend that — according to Al Gore — was supposed to look a lot more like a disaster movie than a backyard barbecue.

Twenty years ago, "An Inconvenient Truth" hit theaters and the world collectively lost its mind. Standing ovations at Sundance. An Academy Award. A Nobel Peace Prize. A PowerPoint presentation that somehow convinced an entire generation of politicians to spend trillions of dollars rearranging the global economy.

So let's check the receipts.

1. Kilimanjaro Would Be Snow-Free "Within the Decade" Gore stood in front of before-and-after photos of Mount Kilimanjaro and declared the snow would be completely gone within ten years. That was 2006. It is now 2026. There is still snow on Kilimanjaro. In fact, there were record snowfalls in 2018. Tour operators at the mountain have specifically noted that tourists keep showing up expecting to see a bare mountain — and keep being surprised by the snow. Two decades. Still snowing. Next.

2. Glacier National Park Would Cease to Exist as a Glacier Park by 2021 Gore visited Glacier National Park and predicted "within 15 years, this will be the park formerly known as Glacier." The park actually had to remove signs they'd installed predicting the glaciers would be gone by 2020 — because 2020 came and went and the glaciers were still there. A national park had to take down its own doom signs. That's a special kind of wrong.

3. The Arctic Would Be Ice-Free by 2013 Gore predicted the Arctic Ocean could lose all its summer sea ice by 2013. Current scientists now project that might happen somewhere between 2040 and 2060 — decades later than Gore's timeline. As of 2023 the Arctic summer minimum ice extent was still 4.23 million square kilometers. Not great. Not gone.

4. Manhattan Would Be Underwater The film's most famous imagery showed the World Trade Center memorial site submerged under 20 feet of water. Gore warned of sea level rises of "up to 20 feet in the near future." The actual measured sea level rise since 2006? About three inches. Manhattan is still there. The Statue of Liberty is dry. The subway floods when it rains, but that's not climate change — that's just the New York City subway.

5. Hurricane Katrina Was Just the Beginning Gore connected Katrina to global warming and implied an era of increasingly frequent monster hurricanes was upon us. Twenty years of hurricane data later, NOAA's own scientists say they "cannot conclude with high confidence" that greenhouse gases have changed Atlantic hurricane activity beyond natural variability. Frequency has not increased. The apocalyptic hurricane era never arrived.

6. CO2 Would Double — Hitting 750 Parts Per Million by Mid-Century Gore used a prop lift to dramatically show CO2 levels and predicted concentrations would be "well over 750 ppm" within 50 years. Current CO2 is around 422 ppm — up from 380 ppm when the movie was made. At the actual rate of increase, we'd hit 750 ppm in about 185 years — not 50. He was off by a factor of nearly four.

7. Billions Spent on the Prediction Here's the one that actually stings. Whether you believe in climate change or not — whether you think the planet is warming or cooling or doing the cha-cha — the specific catastrophic timeline predictionsin that film drove trillions of dollars in policy spending. Electric car mandates. Net-zero targets. Europe's energy crisis. Solar subsidies. Carbon taxes. Low-flow showerheads that don't actually work. All justified by a PowerPoint presentation with predictions that didn't hold up.

The Fairest Thing I Can Say 

The planet has gotten warmer. That part is real. But the scale, the timeline, and the apocalyptic imagery that Gore used to justify a generation of expensive, economy-disrupting policy? Twenty years later, the receipts are in.

The inconvenient truth about "An Inconvenient Truth" is that it wasn't really science. It was a sermon. Complete with sin, judgment, and a collection plate.

And this Sunday, you're going to be standing outside in perfectly survivable weather, grilling something excellent, proving once again that the best response to someone telling you the world is ending is to enjoy the world.

Happy Memorial Day.

Go enjoy your weekend. You've earned it.

— Steven Volpp