Truth
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Al Gore’s infamous global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”— a film that earned an Oscar, twenty-five million dollars at the box office, and a standing ovation at Sundance. It reshaped how universities, Hollywood, and governments talked about climate change for a generation. To challenge its claims was, for a time, one of the worst cultural heresies one could commit!
Gore recently appeared at an anniversary ceremony for the film and said it is even more relevant today than when it first came out. Despite the ambiguous langauge change from “global warming” to “climate change,” Gore says his core claims remain unchanged: that climate change is happening, that it is human-caused, and that it presents an existential threat requiring immediate and drastic action. That’s quite a long time to insist mass hysteria must continue.
The biggest problem for Gore’s famous film, however, is the data, which have not been very cooperative. Several analytical reviews have reminded us that Gore's apocalyptic predictions of catastrophic floods, droughts, and storms have not materialized as promised. Deaths from climate-related disasters have actually plummeted over the past century even as global population quadrupled. Gore’s projections on nearly every topic from sea levels rising, to glacier catastrophes, and even polar bear populations have proven wildly inaccurate. Even the left-leaning publication Slate noted the film was not scrubbed for factual precision.
The real truth is: “An Inconvenient Truth” was always more philosophy than science. Al Gore framed it explicitly as a moral issue, and that framing reveals its true nature. He has been making a worldview argument, not a scientific one, for two decades. At the root of this is the same naturalistic assumption that has driven secular thinking for generations: that we are here by accident, that there is no God superintending history, and that one wrong move by humanity could bring everything crashing down.
The Christian vision (and truthful science) is entirely different. Human beings are not accidents. We are not problems to be solved. In fact, we are stewards who were created to care for the world with wisdom and responsibility, trusting that history is not ultimately in our hands.
Correctly categorizing Al Gore’s 20-year-old claims as moral, rather than scientific, opens a wide path to better understanding of the globe and our rightful place in it.
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