Speaking of people who see what they want to see, The Economist in their June 5 “The Climate Issue” assures us that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was truly prophetic. (And speaking of not seeing what we want to, the newsletter does not appear to posted online as a PDF unlike our newsletters, though if we can do it on our tiny budget it is not clear why the mighty Economist can’t.) After noting that it made him rich and even more famous, “bagged Mr Gore the Nobel Peace Prize and won two Oscars” and “later inspired an opera in Milan”, author Rachel Dobbs notes that at the time, The Economist lavished praise on it because “time is running out faster than most of the world thinks” if “Mr Gore should happen to be right”. Then she asks “Two decades on, was he?” and astoundingly says “Mostly.” Pfui. If Al Gore had been right, we’d be in the boiling climate soup by now and we aren’t.

Since at CDN we try to be kind, inviting Douglas Adams’ jibe about “an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good-naturedly”, we will agree with Ms. Dobbs that:

“A documentary based on a middle-aged politician’s PowerPoint presentation doesn’t sound like a recipe for cinematic success. One that uses ice-core data to teach the audience about a ‘moral issue’ concerning their ‘future as a civilisation’ might be the unlikeliest smash hit ever.”

Even there we would add that modern journalists, like movie-makers and many others on the blunt modern cutting edge, chronically underestimate people’s desire for substance over clickbait. But the substance here leaves much to be desired.

In the newsletter she admits that “Some of his most dramatic predictions now seem overwrought – there is still snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance” but immediately and wrongly continues “but the overall direction was correct.” Just as she wrongly insists that:

“The mechanisms that Mr Gore described are scientifically sound: burning fossil fuels does pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming the planet.”

Goodness gracious. Are we children? Does she think her audience is? Is she?

That CO2 functions as a greenhouse gas at very low temperatures and concentrations is indeed scientifically sound and almost nobody disagrees. (If you have personally reinvented physics in such a way that it does not, we do not wish to hear from you.) But as concentrations rise, the impact is logarithmic, diminishing quite rapidly, especially as it absorbs infrared at a number of points where competing GHGs also do so, including H2O, and it is far from clear that we are not now, for all practical purposes, at the point where it is trivial. In support of which we adduce, for the adults in the room, the fact that very rarely in prehistory or history can CO2 and temperature even be shown to move together let alone with the former driving the latter.

They did in the late 20^th century when many of today’s guardians of orthodoxy stood on a peak in the laboratory gazing in rapt wonder at this dazzling new theory. But they haven’t even in the early 21^st, and they didn’t earlier in the 20^th, nor indeed at almost any other time in the Holocene. As for the rest of it, we doubt Mr. Gore could pass a basic quiz on climate physics any more than John Kerry could have, and we think it matters. Or on climate history; among many inexcusable fatuities in An Inconvenient Truth he claims that weather patterns in the Holocene were essentially stable from the retreat of the glaciers until the invention of the internal combustion engine. How does The Economist feel about that one?

We think it matters even more that his predictions were so wrong. Ms. Dobbs gives us Kilimanjaro. But she passes over a host of other blunders. For instance, as Bjorn Lomborg observed in his 20-year retrospective:

“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 global population quadrupled, deaths from these climate-related disasters have plummeted. In the 1920s, an average of nearly half a million people died from such events every year. Today, that number is under 10,000 — a decline of over 97 per cent. Richer, smarter societies have made us dramatically safer, proving adaptation and resilience work far better than alarmism suggests.”

OK, OK, you may say. Or she might. That’s not a prediction, that’s a mistaken statement about the past. And maybe wealth and innovation have reduced the impact of the weather even when it was getting worse. But it won’t do. As Lomborg also says:

“Gore’s film claimed we would see more frequent and stronger hurricanes because of climate change. The movie’s poster showed a hurricane coming out of a smokestack. But in fact global data reveal a slight decline both in hurricanes’ frequency and in their total energy since comprehensive satellite data became available in 1980.”

So if you care about historical accuracy they were declining before he made the film, not increasing. And if you care about predictions, they kept declining.

As Lomborg also wrote:

“Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Wildfires follow a similar pattern. Globally, the area burned annually has fallen by more than 25 per cent over the past quarter century, according to NASA data. Because of forest mismanagement, recent years have seen large U.S. fires. But the 1930s Dust Bowl was five times worse. On all other continents fires are down.”

And on and on it goes:

“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 around 12,000 in the 1960s to over 26,000 today. The primary historical threat was hunting, not climate change, and Gore’s claims have simply turned out to be wrong.”

So Gore was wrong about what was happening and what was going to because he was wrong about why.

It might seem unkind to point out that Ms. Dobbs used to be their environment editor and is now a news editor. But alas The Economist, like so many once-skeptical publications, is now in the activism business especially on climate. Indeed, she never does get into the science or the evidence. Instead (drum roll please) she gets into the politics:

“What has really changed is the politics. In 2007, the year after ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ came out, Gallup polling found that 55% of Democrats worried ‘a great deal’ about climate change, versus 24% of Republicans. In 2026, it was 72% of Democrats and just 6% of Republicans. Climate change is more politically divisive than immigration or race relations. Mr Gore’s critics have long argued that, as a high-ranking Democrat, he helped turn climate change from a scientific issue into a tribal one. His defenders counter that the subject was already being weaponised by conservative commentators and fossil-fuel lobbyists.”

Weaponized? Climate change? By the right? In 2006? Are you dreaming?

So it seems:

“Markets have proved more effective than moralising. In 2025 renewables produced more electricity than coal worldwide; this April was the first month ever where wind and solar overtook gas. Both are the result of plummeting costs – solar, in particular, is now the cheapest form of energy generation to install in history.”

Again, as Bjorn Lomborg observes, it’s just not true. As we also quote him in the previous item in this newsletter:

“In 2006, according to the International Energy Agency, the world got 82.6 per cent of its total energy from fossil fuels. In 2023, the last year for which global data are available, the share was 81.1 per cent. On this trend, it will take over six centuries to get to zero.”

So instead of heading to the research department, or at least a Google search, it’s all hands to the fire pump for Ms. Dobbs and by implication her employer, who at least did not see fit to insist on editing in some balance:

“But market forces have not stopped temperatures rising further: today’s targets put the world on track to warm by roughly 2.6°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Nor can they undo the harm that climate change is already causing. The World Meteorological Organisation announced that an El Niño – the weather pattern which temporarily drives up temperatures and redistributes rainfall – should begin imminently. Some models suggest that the incoming ‘Godzilla’ El Niño will be the strongest in decades. If so, it threatens to slash food supplies and snarl global shipping at a time when both are already experiencing severe shocks from America’s war with Iran. (The last one, in 2023, drove a drought that throttled the Panama Canal.) Almost all climate scientists are convinced that climate change has made the impacts of El Niños far worse. The truth is more inconvenient than ever.”

Bosh. El Niños aren’t climate-related at all. Though it’s the sort of thing Al Gore might well have said.