As the snow falls outside my window and the thermometer registers a cold 2.5 degrees, my mind wanders back twenty years to 2006.
In 2006, my wife Connie was a high school librarian, and my main concern was selling advertising, not yet in the publisher’s seat of the Gasconade County Republican. Our firstborn, Jacob, was a sophomore in high school, Ethan was in eighth grade, and our baby, Abigail, was reading Harry Potter in fourth grade.
Here are some of the major events that 2006 gave us:
• Walt Disney purchased Pixar for $7.6 billion
• Barry Bonds hit his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth on the MLB list
• Twitter is launched
• Pluto is demoted from the ninth planet from the sun to a dwarf planet
• Chick-fil-A founder purchased the last Taurus off the Ford assembly line
• Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion
• A gallon of gas averaged $3.03, a gallon of milk was $3.23 and a dozen eggs were 98 cents.
• The average annual income was $37,900, the median cost of a new home was $244,900 and a Chevrolet Corvette had a sticker price of $43,690.
• Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released
Funny thing about time. It can be cruel to those who make predictions, especially about doom and gloom.
One of Gore’s first predictions was that by 2016 — due to global warming — there would be no snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. As of 2022, the mountain’s upper altitude saw an average of 14 feet of snow in November and December.
Prediction: wrong
Gore’s next prediction concerned Glacier National Park — where Connie and I spent our honeymoon. “Within 15 years, this will be the park formerly known as Glacier.”
Authors of a 2010 study wrote of the demise of Glacier National Park, “under the most probable temperature increase...we conservatively estimate the glacier persisting through at least 2080.”
Prediction number two: wrong
Later in the movie, Gore claims that Hurricane Katrina — from 2005, which killed 1,392 people and caused damage estimated at $125 billion — is proof that these storms will become stronger and more frequent due to global warming. From 2003 to 2005, 14 hurricanes made landfall in the United States. That number was eight from 2022 to 2024. Interestingly, no hurricanes made U.S. landfall last year, the first time since 2015.
Prediction number three: wrong
In the documentary, Gore warns that global warming will bring about more rain and drought. He points to Lake Chad in the middle of Africa to back up his claims of increased drought.
According to a report by NASA, Lake Chad has lost most of its water in the past half-century, with the largest amount depleted between 1960 and the mid-1980’s, long before the term Global Warming. NASA ends its report by saying, “While lake levels now appear to be stable, and rainfall is increasing somewhat, the existing data are not enough to say for sure what the future looks like.”
The Palmer Drought Severity Index measures the severity of droughts over time. In 2006, the index for the United States was -2.21. In 2020, it was at +1.84. For reference, the index’s low point was in 1934 at -6.69.
Drought prediction: wrong
In his acceptance speech for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Gore said the North Polar Ice cap was falling off a cliff and polar bears would soon drown. Two years later, he said there was a “75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
A paper published last September in the American Geophysical Union pointed out that over the past 20 years, “Arctic Sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
At the other end, the European Geosciences Union’s peer-reviewed journal, the Cryosphere, in a 2023 report, said the Antarctic ice shelf area grew by 2048.27 square miles between 2009 and 2019, gaining 661 gigatonnes of ice mass.
Gore does not have a good record in weather predictions. He is not worried about that. It is estimated that Gore has earned over $330 million from climate alarmism.
If you would like to learn more, please click on the links below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaciers_in_Glacier_National_Park_(U.S.)
https://capitalresearch.org/article/al-gores-30-years-of-climate-errors-part-2/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/hurricanes-made-landfall-us-2025/story?id=127896520
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/lake-chad/
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drought-severity-index-us?time=earliest..1995
https://arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/report-card-2024/greenland-ice-sheet-2024/
