Former Vice President Al Gore — the man who told us the Arctic ice caps would be completely gone by 2014 — showed up at a Hollywood awards ceremony last week to deliver his latest doomsday prophecy. This time, the Gulf Stream is going to collapse within 25 years and we’re all going to freeze to death. Or burn to death. Or something. The details change every decade but the solution is always the same: give them more money and more control over your life.
Actor Bradley Whitford — best known for his role on The West Wing — helpfully chimed in that the Gulf Stream collapse could trigger “an ice age in, like, 10 years.” Even Gore had to pump the brakes on that one. When Al Gore thinks your climate take is too hysterical, you’ve really accomplished something.
Let’s rewind the tape for a second. In 2009, Al Gore stood at the Copenhagen Climate Conference and told the entire world that there was a “75 percent chance” the Arctic would have ice-free summers within five to seven years. That was 17 years ago. The Arctic still has ice. Polar bears are doing fine. Nobody apologized. Nobody issued a correction. They just moved on to the next prediction like a doomsday preacher pushing back the rapture date.
And now he’s back with a brand-new apocalypse. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — that’s the fancy science name for the ocean currents that keep Europe from turning into Siberia — is going to shut down. Gore says it’s “a very real threat” and cited “recent British newspaper reports” as his evidence.
British newspaper reports. Not peer-reviewed studies. Not data from oceanographic sensors. Newspaper reports. From the same British press that once ran a headline about a woman who married a ghost.
Here’s the awkward part for Gore’s dramatic Hollywood moment: a study published in Nature in February 2025, led by U.K. Met Office oceanographer Jonathan Baker, examined 34 climate models and found no full Gulf Stream collapse before the year 2100. Thirty-four models. Zero collapses. But sure, Al, the newspapers say otherwise, so we should probably restructure the entire global economy just in case.
Now, there IS a 2023 paper in Nature Communications that suggested a possible mid-century risk. So we’ve got dueling studies — one says “not happening this century” and one says “maybe.” And Al Gore cherry-picked the scary one. At a Hollywood awards show. While accepting praise from actors.
This is the climate change grift in a nutshell, folks. You take a legitimate scientific question — how stable are ocean currents in a warming world? — and you strip out all the nuance, crank the fear to eleven, and present it to a room full of celebrities who will clap like trained seals and then fly home on private jets.
Gore actually went on a podcast in March and claimed that his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” has been “proven dead right.” Dead right! The movie that predicted the Arctic would be ice-free, that sea levels would rise 20 feet, that Mount Kilimanjaro would have no snow — none of which happened — has been “proven dead right.” That takes a level of confidence that borders on clinical.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same man who sold his TV network to Al Jazeera — literally a media company funded by Qatari oil money — for $500 million and then went right back to lecturing the rest of us about fossil fuels. The same man whose Tennessee mansion uses more electricity in a month than most American families use in a year. The same man who has made an estimated $330 million since leaving office, largely from climate-related investments and speaking fees.
Follow the money. It always comes back to the money.
The venue for Gore’s latest prophecy tells you everything you need to know. The “Sustainability in Entertainment Honors” event in Los Angeles. An awards show about sustainability. In the entertainment industry. The industry that runs diesel generators on every film set, flies actors on private jets to location shoots, and builds elaborate sets that get thrown in dumpsters after three weeks of filming. THAT industry is honoring ITSELF for sustainability.
(We are truly living in the dumbest timeline.)
Meanwhile, regular Americans are paying $4 for a gallon of gas, watching their electricity bills climb because coal plants got shut down and replaced with windmills that don’t work when it’s not windy, and being told they need to buy a $55,000 electric car to save the planet. All so Al Gore can stand in front of Bradley Whitford and predict ice ages.
Here’s what’s actually happening: the climate changes. It always has. The “scientists” who Gore cites can’t even agree among themselves whether the Gulf Stream is at risk this century or not. And the people screaming loudest about the apocalypse are the ones who stand to profit the most from the panic.
Al Gore has been wrong about every major climate prediction he’s ever made. Every single one. And yet he keeps showing up, keeps making new predictions, and keeps getting standing ovations from Hollywood millionaires who think recycling their kombucha bottles makes them heroes.
We’ll check back in 25 years when the Gulf Stream is still flowing and Al Gore is 103 years old, giving a speech at the “Sustainability in Metaverse Awards” about how the ocean is DEFINITELY going to stop this time. And Bradley Whitford’s hologram will nod along solemnly.