HOW IT STARTED: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.
—The London Independent, March 20th, 2000.
How It’s Going: Al Gore invokes disaster film, warns of ice age within 25 years.
Former 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.
With America about to celebrate its 250th anniversary and with many of its citizens still having fond memories of the bicentennial, the return to global cooling is also a return to the zanier aspects of the decade that never dies, the 1970s. Leonard Nimoy tried to warn us of “the coming ice age” in 1978, but alas to no avail:
As did Walter Cronkite in 1972:
Exit question from the late Scott Adams in 2018: “How many heads would explode if global temperatures head lower during the Trump administration?”
Via Lee Zeldin:
The ultimate authority on all questions involving life on earth, Al Gore, is now declaring that global warming is out, and global freezing is in. Safe bet that he found a whole new angle to line his pockets off the climate grift. pic.twitter.com/oQ5CtY9laS
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) April 29, 2026