The inconvenient truth for Al Gore is that his immodestly prophetic book published 20 years ago proved to be false.

The polar bear population has doubled. Wildfires are down in North America as well as every other continent.  Hurricanes and other extreme weather events are milder and less frequent, and fatalities due to it are far fewer. The snows of Kilimanjaro are still there. Manhattan is not under water.

In fact, the seas have barely risen. The Netherlands are no more nether than ever, and the seas would have to rise another 5,280 feet to reach the Mile High City of Denver.

The result has been catastrophic – for sales of sales of Al Gore’s book, that is.

Don’t assume from this that I think the whole climate thing was a hoax, a la The Piltdown Man. Most (not all) glaciers have receded in the last few generations, and the temperature looks to be up a degree or two in the last few centuries. It’s a fact that CO2 and certain other carbon gasses (particularly methane) can produce a “greenhouse effect” whereby they trap infrared radiation. That could account for the slightly higher temperatures.

Or not. The greenhouse effect, while real, is a simplistic analysis when it comes to weather and climate. In the real world, there are many confounding factors such as cloud cover and weather patterns.

Some of these confounding factors appear to countervail greenhouse effects. For example, the warmer it gets, the more the oceans evaporate into the atmosphere to produce clouds that block the sun, thereby making it cooler. The earth has hosted life for billions of years precisely because climate extremes tend to be self-correcting.

In any event, the fabulously expensive, virtue-signaling crusade to switch away from fossil fuels has been a bust. Fossil fuel energy is far greater on an absolute measure and about the same on a percentage basis as it was 20 years ago.

Blame China. While the U.S. and Europe went hog wild on “green” energy, China smirked and smoked cheap coal energy. How exactly the project of saving the earth from fossil fuels was supposed to work, without China’s buy-in, was never explained.

I suspect that, deep down, they never intended to save the earth. Rather, they intended to make a show of saving the earth. As in much of what emanates from the left, it was all theater and they were the stars.

Speaking of which, the fundamental problem with “An Inconvenient Truth” was that it was written by an attention-seeking politician, and a controversial one at that. After losing his bid for the Presidency and formally conceding defeat, and then revoking his concession and embarking on a vain, litigious election denial where he left the country in limbo for 35 days until the Supreme Court put him out of his, and our, misery, Al Gore had an ax to grind, to put it mildly.

Gore succeeded in garnering attention he sought (and several hundred million dollars he sought from “green” investment schemes) but of course he could have written fairy tales – some say he did – and gotten the same attention (but not the same money). The poodle press, almost as bitter as Gore about his election defeat, savored every word.

“Global warming” as it was called until the recent rebranding into “climate change” (the left are masters at rebranding, perhaps because they have such frequent need for it) was quickly accepted as gospel by the left, and Gore was canonized as a living prophet in the new religion of global-warming-climate-change-whatever. Call them “Warmingites.”

Meanwhile, people who already had a religion were skeptical. The Warmingites were loud and fanatical in their proselytizing zeal, as in “believe, or we’ll tie you to a stake and release the carbon in you.” That of course just served to deepen the skepticism of the skeptics. People know that “facts” that require fanatical shouting and threats are typically not facts at all.

It’s ironic that the Warmingites shouted “skeptic” as if that’s an insult. In real science, skepticism about unproven theories is a virtue. Perhaps recognizing that, belatedly, the Warmingites rebranded “skeptic” into “denier.” As if a person skeptical about the extravagant – nay, miraculous – claims of the Warmingites was on a par with Holocaust deniers.

The irony is now doubled. As things developed over the course of the last 20 years, climate skeptics are not likely to be the Holocaust deniers; rather, the Warmingites themselves are likely to be. Both the Warmingites and the Holocaust deniers share the same political party, both do a lot of shouting, both make a lot of threats, both increasingly get violent, and both are likely to have bad breath, bad hair and bad manners. Think Democratic National Convention.

This outcome is a pity from a human health and scientific standpoint. The world could have benefited from a real analysis of real climate issues from real scientists. We instead got a hysterical, divisive, attention-seeking diatribe from a bitter, losing politician who helped spawn an era of viewpoint intolerance, all perversely in the name of science.

Al Gore’s unforgivable sin was not in being wrong – though he was indeed wrong – but in using his own power and greed to poison the discussion. Leftists are like that.