…And Maybe His Beach House Value, But Who’s Counting?
You know how every summer a meteorologist screams “Category 5 apocalypse!” and the biggest storm we end up with is a light drizzle that barely ruins a barbecue?
After the tenth or so false alarm, people stop nailing plywood over their windows, keep hamburgers on the grill, and tune out the sirens.
It’s not denial; it’s pattern recognition. Cry wolf too many times, and eventually the villagers go back to binging Stranger Things.
Twenty years ago, Al Gore famously dropped An Inconvenient Truth like it was the final word from on high. The former vice president and Nobel laureate, and the man who invented the internet (or at least the weather forecasts), promised us the complete end-times package: vanishing polar ice caps, cities submerged underwater faster than you can say “evacuate Florida,” and snow becoming a fairy tale for kids.
Dissent? That was simply “denial,” or the moral equivalent of kicking puppies.
Settled science, folks: pay up or shut up.
Fast-forward two decades and ask yourself, how’d that work out?
The Predictions That Missed Harder Than a Drunk Darts Player
Gore shared dramatic graphs.
Polar ice? Gone, any day now.
Sea levels? Twenty feet in the “near future,” which, in political time, means “before the checks clear.”
Arctic summers ice-free by, oh, pick a year, any year; 2013, 2014, five to seven years from whenever he was speaking.
Snows of Kilimanjaro? Vanished within a decade.
Coastal cities? Should be holding snorkel conventions by now.
Reality, being the stubborn jerk that it is, refused to cooperate with Tipper’s husband.
Arctic ice dips and bobs like it’s on a budget seesaw—it never quite disappears.
Sea levels creep up a modest few millimeters each year, and at this rate, your great-great-grandkids might need taller beach chairs.
Snow still falls on Kilimanjaro, while cities keep building condos on the water like it’s prime real estate.
No mass evacuations, no sirens, just… life.
Deadlines came and went quieter than a mime convention. There wasn’t a press conference with Gore saying, “Oops! My bad; turns out the models were a little more enthusiastic than I thought.” Just new deadlines, fresh urgency, yet using the same PowerPoint.
Hellbound and Down 