Al Gore told us the snows of Kilimanjaro would be gone by 2016. They're still there. He told us Hurricane Katrina was a preview of increasingly devastating storm seasons. The seasons that followed were unremarkable. He told us the science was settled and the clock was ticking.
Now he's back on television comparing you to a slave owner for noticing his predictions have all been wrong.
The former Vice President sat down with ABC News at his family farm in Tennessee to mark the 20th anniversary of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." The 2006 film won two Academy Awards and launched Gore from failed presidential candidate to full-time climate prophet. During the interview, which aired on Good Morning America with Robin Roberts and ABC News Chief Climate Correspondent Ginger Zee, Gore was asked whether he still considers climate change a moral and spiritual issue.
His answer was remarkable. Gore said he puts climate change "in the context of all of the other morally based challenges that humanity has confronted: the abolition of slavery, the women's rights and women's suffrage." Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference of scientific interpretation. Slavery.
When pressed on whether the predictions in his film actually held up, Gore insisted "the scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it." He dismissed specific criticisms of his failed forecasts by saying critics had merely "cherry picked a few little" elements. The main thrust, he argued, was correct.
The numbers he trotted out sound alarming in isolation. CO2 levels have risen from 380 parts per million in 2006 to 430 ppm today. He claimed 2015 through 2025 were the eleven hottest consecutive years on record. He said 95 percent of Arctic old ice has declined since the 1980s. And then he dropped this figure: "We're trapping so much heat every day it's equal to 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the earth."
Eight hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. Per day. From the man sitting on a family farm in Tennessee whose personal net worth sits somewhere between $200 million and $300 million, much of it accumulated through green energy investments and speaking fees earned by telling the rest of us we consume too much.
Ginger Zee, for her part, told viewers she "felt hopeful walking away from our conversation." Which is exactly the kind of rigorous follow-up journalism you'd expect from a network segment that didn't bother to fact-check a single failed prediction from the original film.
Gore also declared that "the U.S. is hurting ourselves by pretending that it's not real," a line aimed squarely at the current administration's energy policies. He pointed to solar energy surpassing coal for the first time in May 2026 and claimed 90 percent of new U.S. electricity generation in 2025 came from renewables. Those figures have context he conveniently didn't provide — subsidies, grid reliability concerns, and the fact that "new generation" doesn't mean "total generation." But context has never been Gore's strong suit.
The pattern here is familiar. Gore makes sweeping predictions. The predictions fail to materialize on the timelines he set. When confronted, he calls the specific failures "cherry picking" and pivots to broader claims that are harder to pin down. And when that stops working, he escalates the moral rhetoric. First it was an environmental crisis. Then a moral crisis. Now if you're not on board, you're in the same moral category as people who owned human beings.
This is the same man who produced a film predicting the Kilimanjaro snowcap would vanish — it didn't — and that Katrina-level hurricanes would become the norm — they didn't. He's been wrong on specifics so consistently that he's had to abandon specifics altogether and retreat to moral grandstanding.
The abolition of slavery involved freeing millions of people held in physical bondage. It required a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans. Comparing that to a policy disagreement about carbon emissions isn't bold moral clarity. It's what happens when your data stopped cooperating a decade ago and indignation is all you have left.
Gore gave the climate movement thirty years and two documentaries. The ice caps are still there, Kilimanjaro still has snow, and the moral framework just keeps getting bigger to cover for predictions that keep getting smaller.