Noted climate activist and former Vice President Al Gore, who made headlines this week after he claimed global warming was ‘boiling the oceans,’ has a history of making climate-related proclamations later proven to be false.
During remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, Gore warned that continued carbon emissions into the atmosphere would destroy the planet and lead to widespread calamities.
‘We’re still putting 162 million tons [of greenhouse gas] into it every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth,’ Gore said. ‘That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.’
Gore then noted a prediction that the number of climate refugees worldwide would surge to a billion within the century. He added that such a surge would lead to nations losing their ‘capacity for self-governance.’ But while Gore has been provided large platforms, giving speeches at the World Economic Forum, United Nations conference and other high-profile events, many of his past statements have already been disproven.
For example, Gore said during a speech at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 that there was ‘a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.’ The former vice president made similar comments at least twice before in speeches, citing research.
However, the Arctic ice cap hasn’t been eliminated at any point over the last decade. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Arctic ice minimum extent, or ice coverage during the warmest month of the year, is declining at 12.6% per decade.
In addition, in his 2006 global warming documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ Gore predicted that the global sea level could rise as much as 20 feet ‘in the near future.’
Since 1880, the global sea level has risen 8-9 inches and, between 1993-2021, the sea level has ticked up 3.8 inches, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). At that rate, it would take approximately 1,136 years for the world’s sea level to rise 20 feet.
Gore also claimed in 2006 that there would be no solving climate change if drastic measures weren’t taken around the world to reduce greenhouse gases by 2016. However, annual global carbon emissions increased from 30.59 billion tons in 2006 to 35.52 billion tons in 2016 and 37.12 billion tons in 2021, according to the Global Carbon Project. Gore has continued to argue for climate action to save the planet.
‘Well, some changes, unfortunately, have already been locked in place,’ Gore said when asked by ABC News about the prediction in 2019. ‘Sea level increases are going to continue no matter what we do now. But, we can prevent much larger sea level increases — much more rapid increases in temperatures.’
And in a 2007 speech delivered in Norway after receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for his work informing the public about the dangers posed by climate change, Gore noted research that said the Earth’s average temperature would increase by ‘many degrees’ if the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubled.
Scientists, though, have projected the world’s temperature to increase by at most 2.9 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period by 2100 when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is expected to double, the New York Times reported in November. That would amount to an increase of 1 degree Celsius compared to 2022, according to the NOAA.
In the same speech, Gore warned that stronger storms would continue to threaten entire cities. However, there has been a slight downward trend over the last 30 years of the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index, a tool used to measure tropical storm activity around the world, according to meteorologist and NOAA’s former chief scientist Ryan Maue.
‘The climate movement’s real weakness is that, besides the intellectual bankruptcy of what they’re trying to do, is that they’re led by these clowns like Al Gore and John Kerry and Joe Biden,’ Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and publisher of JunkScience.com, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
‘They say such extreme things — and all the institutions, the government and the media. How do they ever walk any of that back?’ he continued. ‘The answer is they can’t. So, they’ve got to move forward providing cover.’