Al Gore says climate scientists were right after 20 years of An Inconvenient Truth

Al Gore used the 20th anniversary of An Inconvenient Truth to argue that the central warnings in his climate film are no longer theoretical. Asked in a 2026 ABC News interview whether the documentary’s predictions held up, Gore answered, “Unfortunately, yes,” and said “the scientists were dead right on all the important elements.” The world’s climate records now back that claim with hard numbers: the World Meteorological Organization said 2024 was likely the first calendar year more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and the warmest year in the 175-year observational record.

That makes the film’s anniversary less a nostalgia marker than an accountability check. In his reflection, Gore said he was initially skeptical that his climate slideshow could become a successful movie, but the project reached a far larger audience than he expected. An Inconvenient Truth premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2006, opened in U.S. theaters on May 24, 2006, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 79th Academy Awards on February 25, 2007. Made on a reported budget of about $1 million, it became a surprise commercial hit with worldwide box office of about $50 million.

Gore’s warning was not only about abstract temperature averages. He said the heat trapped each day is equivalent to about 800,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding daily, a scale meant to convey the pace of the warming problem in physical terms. Two decades later, NOAA says 2024 was the warmest year in its record and that the ten warmest years have all occurred since 2015, evidence that the warming trend has not slowed but accelerated into a sustained pattern.

The long-term measurements tell the same story. NASA says global sea level has risen about 97.8 mm since 1993, while NOAA says global mean sea level has risen about 8 to 9 inches since 1880. Those figures match the broader arc Gore tried to popularize in 2006 and show how much of the climate debate has moved from prediction to documentation.

The film’s legacy remains split. Supporters say An Inconvenient Truth helped push climate change into the mainstream and opened the eyes of millions worldwide. Critics still argue it overstated some risks and helped politicize the issue. But the core record now sits with the data: the warnings that once sounded alarmist are increasingly the baseline against which governments, companies and voters are being judged.