Al Gore says scientists were right about climate change all along
Two decades after An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said the film's warnings held up as 2024 became the hottest year on record.
Al Gore used the 20th anniversary of An Inconvenient Truth to make a blunt case that the climate science in his 2006 film aged better than the politics around it. Asked whether the documentary’s warnings held up, Gore answered, “Unfortunately, yes,” and said “the scientists were dead right on all the important elements of it.”
That judgment now sits against a harsh temperature record. The World Meteorological Organization said 2024 was likely the first calendar year to run more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era, at 1.55, plus or minus 0.13 degrees, above the 1850-1900 average. NASA and Copernicus Climate Change Service both confirmed 2024 as the warmest year on record globally, and NASA said average temperatures were more than 1.5 degrees above the baseline for more than half the year.
Gore’s film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 24, 2006, then opened in U.S. theaters on May 24, 2006. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, it was made on a relatively small budget of about $1.5 million and went on to gross tens of millions of dollars worldwide, turning what Gore once viewed as a classroom-style slideshow into one of the defining climate films of its era. The companion book, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It, was published in 2006 by Rodale Press.
The film’s cultural reach was matched by unusual awards history. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later recognized An Inconvenient Truth with the 2007 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and Melissa Etheridge’s I Need to Wake Up won Best Original Song, making it the first documentary to win in that category. The movie’s mix of policy warning and pop culture carried Gore far beyond Tennessee and into the center of the climate debate.
Two decades later, the scientific backdrop is even more direct. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said human influence has unequivocally warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Gore’s warning that humanity was “using the sky as an open sewer” now reads less like provocation than diagnosis, as the planet keeps absorbing heat at a pace climate scientists have long said would remake daily life, public health and the costs of inaction.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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