Lies Al Gore told me

It was just another day in school in the sweltering heat of suburban South Florida. Upon our return from afternoon recess, our fifth-grade teacher treated us to a documentary written and presented by former Vice President Al Gore. The hit documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, released exactly 20 years ago, made a marked impression on me and my classmates. Gore’s warnings of super-hurricanes and a submerged Floridian peninsula filled the classroom with alarm, especially in the wake of devastation from Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina. In the two decades since the film’s release, Left-of-center politics has inculcated millions of young Americans — me included — in the belief that climate change poses an existential crisis. In the documentary, Gore himself used the false analogy of a slow-boiled fr