The Inconvenience of an Inconvenient Truth

Author: John Stonestreet and Dr. Timothy D. Padgett

Twenty years ago, Al Gore released the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” After premiering to a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival, it earned $25 million at the box office and an Oscar for Best Documentary. Twenty years later, Gore stands behind the film. “From my perspective, the movie is even more relevant today than when it first came out,” he recently stated at an anniversary ceremony for the film, adding that global warming is “not solved.”

Gore’s primary claims today are the same as they were a generation ago. Climate change is happening. It is human-caused. And it presents an existential threat tothe human race. And unless the nations of the world take immediate and drastic steps to alter economic and political structures, the runaway effects of warming willdoom us all.

In the documentary, Gore evoked a line from Mark Twain: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” In other words, the world was not too big for humanity to mess up, as many believed. “Maybe that was true at one time,” he said, “but it’s not anymore.”

An Inconvenient Truth is the most consequential documentary of the last half-century. Gore’s prophecies had a profound impact on culture, from Hollywood to D.C. to the sciences and even the humanities in most universities. For quite a while, to challenge his claims was the equivalent to being a flat-earther.

Not as much anymore. A recent article in National Review outlined Gore’s failed prophecies. He promised “a world besieged by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires,” wrote author Bjorn Lamborg. “The data tell a different story. Over the past century, as the global population quadrupled, deaths from climate-related disasters have plummeted.” According to Lamborg, Gore was wrong about the catastrophic rise in sea levels, the cause of shrinking glaciers, extreme weather events, and the polar bear population.

Even the left-wing journal Slate published critiques for Gore: “Considering the multiple times Gore has given his greenhouse slide show (he says “thousands”), it’s jarring that the movie was not scrubbed for factual precision.” Also, as Cornwall Alliance founder and President E. Calvin Beisner has argued, the widely believed and repeated assertion that almost all scientists agree with Gore’s version of climate change is simply not so.

An Inconvenient Truth was always more philosophy than it was science. Gore over-catastrophized his facts and figures in terms that did not allow for dissent. He claimed that “(u)ltimately, this is really not a political issue, so much as a moral issue.” In fact, it was always a worldview issue. Specifically, what we believe about the kind of world we live in and our place within it.

If, as naturalistic worldviews demand, there is no God overseeing and superintending the flow of history, we are all here by accident. As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said,

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook.

In other words, it’s all an accident, so one little slip-up by us could bring the universe crashing down. This is the vision behind most catastrophic visions, like Gore’s.

And what is our place in the cosmos? Francis Schaeffer wrote almost 60 years ago, “A Christian-based science and technology should consciously try to see nature healed, while waiting for the coming complete healing at Christ’s return.” It’s an incredible difference whether we are divinely appointed as stewards of this world or problems to be solved.

An Inconvenient Truth described a world on the precipice of a disaster we caused and probably couldn’t fix. The Christian vision is that we aren’t alone or ultimately in charge. We are responsible and valuable, created to meaningfully care for the rest of creation. Between the Bible and Gore’s film is all the difference in the world.