Al Gore invokes disaster film, warns of ice age within 25 years
by The Washington Times AI News Desk · The Washington TimesFormer Vice President Al Gore warned a Hollywood audience Thursday that a Gulf Stream collapse could occur within 25 years, remarks that came 20 years after his climate documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” drew criticism for predictions that did not bear out.
Mr. Gore, 78, appeared at the inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors, co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance at Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. He participated in a keynote conversation with actor Bradley Whitford of “The West Wing,” timed to the 20th anniversary of “An Inconvenient Truth.”
According to a Breitbart account of the event, Mr. Gore invoked the scenario depicted in the 2004 disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow” — though he repeatedly referred to it as “The Day After,” the title of a separate 1983 television film about nuclear war — saying a shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, commonly called the Gulf Stream, is “a very real threat within the next 25 years.”
“That movie that I mentioned, ’The Day After’ about the Gulf Stream shutting down, well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of the scientists who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Mr. Whitford raised a more compressed timeline, suggesting that a Gulf Stream collapse could put the world “in an ice age in, like, 10 years.” Mr. Gore pushed back, saying such a scenario would unfold more slowly, while acknowledging the consequences would be severe.
“It would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond our, anything we can compare it to today,” Mr. Gore said, according to Breitbart.
Scientific assessments of an AMOC collapse vary widely. Some recent studies have placed the risk of a collapse within this century as significant, while a February 2025 study published in Nature concluded that a collapse is unlikely before 2100. Most mainstream projections, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consider a collapse within 25 years to be at the aggressive end of current estimates.
The remarks came as “An Inconvenient Truth” faces renewed scrutiny over predictions attributed to Mr. Gore in the years around its release. In a 2009 speech at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Mr. Gore cited researchers who he said projected a 75% chance the Arctic could be nearly ice-free during some summer months within five to seven years — a forecast that did not materialize. The researcher he cited, Naval Postgraduate School professor Wieslaw Maslowski, said afterward that he did not know how the 75% figure had been arrived at. Arctic sea ice has declined significantly in recent decades but has not disappeared in summer months.
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Mr. Gore has maintained that the film’s warnings have held up. In an interview with The Bulwark, he said its predictions “were proven dead right.”
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