{"id":93717,"date":"2026-05-23T12:43:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T12:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/ronald-bailey-20-years-later-al-gores-climate-movie-helped-turn-a-solvable-problem-into-partisan-warfare\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T12:43:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T12:43:20","slug":"ronald-bailey-20-years-later-al-gores-climate-movie-helped-turn-a-solvable-problem-into-partisan-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/ronald-bailey-20-years-later-al-gores-climate-movie-helped-turn-a-solvable-problem-into-partisan-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Ronald Bailey: 20 Years Later, Al Gore’s Climate Movie Helped Turn a Solvable Problem Into Partisan Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine’s science correspondent, reflects on the legacy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the climate change documentary he rated “a tepid two stars”<\/a> 20 years ago, on Thursday’s edition of the RealClearPolitics podcast. Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine (2006): Gore as Climate Exaggerator<\/a><\/b> He says Gore was directionally correct that fossil fuels contribute to warming, but argues the film exaggerated the threat with an apocalyptic tone and needlessly politicized something technology should be able to solve. “He is correct that adding carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels is tending to increase the global average temperature, Bailey said, but he ended up exaggerating well beyond what the scientific data was telling us. Climate change is a problem, Bailey said, but humanity will be able to deal with it. “I think the main problem is that he ended up eventually politicizing the science of climate change,” he said. “He has a very sort of apocalyptic tone to the piece.” “People may not remember, but Republican stalwarts like John McCain actually had proposed legislation to create a market mechanism for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. So it was a bipartisan issue to some extent or other before this documentary came out, but shortly after that, it became completely adopted by the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party became reactionary, in a sense.” “And so we’re stuck with basically a very bad series of politics over climate change,” he explained. “The really good news is he was also projecting at the time that global warming by the year 2100 might be as high as 4 to 5 degrees centigrade, 7 to 8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the current level,” he added. “Better modeling and better trends on fossil fuel use and so forth suggest that actually the global average temperature will be somewhere between 2 and 2.5 degrees Celsius, which is not great, but it’s not a disaster.” “People back in 2006 would have been basically going, ‘Hooray, we’ve solved the problem,’ if it had been that. So again, I understand that for some, he felt a tremendous urgency to address this problem. I’m afraid, like a lot of preachers, sometimes he exaggerated the sins in order to try to get the sinners to behave better,” he said.
\nRealClearPolitics Videos<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine’s science correspondent, reflects on the legacy of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the climate change documentary he rated “a tepid two stars” 20 years ago, on Thursday’s edition of the RealClearPolitics podcast. Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine (2006): Gore as Climate Exaggerator He says Gore was directionally correct that fossil fuels contribute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5548,6469,29238,3064,62,2076,881,14411,3007,12677,29239,1649,4928,1387],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93717"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93717\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fallsurfing.net\/firstnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}