Review: The Climate According To AI Al Gore
By William F. Marshall, Townhall.com
The inimitable author and documentarian, Joel Gilbert, has once again delivered an informative and entertaining film on a topic and political character, which promise to loom larger if, God forbid, Kamala Harris is our next president.
In his new documentary, The Climate According to AI Al Gore, Gilbert reprises the intensive background research and edgy film-making prowess he’s presented in earlier documentaries, such as Michelle Obama 2024, The Trayvon Hoax, and Dreams from My Real Father, which examined the upbringing and political coming of age of Barack Obama.
In this latest production, Gilbert brings artificial intelligence (the “AI” which appears in the title) to bear in an innovative way to tell his story, which may cause the real Al Gore a bit of consternation.
Gilbert spends the first half of the documentary exploring in-depth the life of former Vice President Al Gore, and the method he uses to bring the information to the viewer takes advantage of artificial intelligence in a way I have not yet seen a documentarian do.
Gilbert, who actually interned for Senator Al Gore in 1989, when Gilbert was an MBA student, uses a faux online conversation with Gore on Skype video to discuss his upbringing, political evolution, and thoughts on climate change, but this fake Al Gore is “honest,” saying what Gilbert thinks Gore would say if he were not a politically craven, self-aggrandizing politician.
In other words, Gilbert creates the dialog of what an honest Al Gore might say when presented with various questions about his political career and policy choices, and marries up that dialog with a video of Al Gore that sounds like him as well on-screen using artificial intelligence, resulting in a somewhat realistic “deep fake” interview of Al Gore, that is both fun and funny. One can tell that the “Al Gore” speaking on-screen is a bit stilted in his words and expressions, but the effect is surprisingly realistic – and a bit creepy.
I’ll put aside for the moment the ethical issues surrounding deep fakes and AI more generally, which is a real area of concern that society is going to have to address. And how the real Al Gore and his attorneys will cotton to Gilbert’s ersatz “interview” is a matter Gilbert may have to deal with. But the approach Gilbert takes here is certainly innovative.
Gilbert makes clear at the outset of the movie that his “interview” with Al Gore is not real and is the product of amazing new AI technology. Whether this method of conveying information to the viewer is better than Gilbert’s prior non-AI films I leave to the viewer.
Gilbert tells the viewer early on that “Al Gore is the godfather of the worldwide climate change movement.” That is certainly true, at least from a political vantage point. What surprised me most was the amount of deception Gore used in the creation of this movement, as Gilbert details from his extensive research.
The movie starts out with a look at Al Gore’s father, Albert Gore Sr., who was one of the most powerful senators in the United States in the 1940s and 50s. I learned far more than I ever expected to about both senior and junior Gore.
Gore Sr. had the financial backing of the very wealthy industrialist, and suspected Soviet agent, Armand Hammer, who funded Gore Sr.’s political campaigns, and would later compensate Gore Sr. handsomely following his retirement from the Senate, by giving Gore Sr. a sinecure position as head of a coal company, earning $500,000 per year, plus paying Gore Sr. for the mineral rights on his Tennessee farm. In exchange, Gore Sr. kept the FBI from investigating Hammer’s Soviet ties.
More interestingly was an apparent money laundering operation that Gore Sr. ran by having Hammer and lobbyists pay exorbitant prices for cattle Gore sold him, which the buyers never actually collected after their expensive purchases. It was just a means of illicitly funneling money to Gore. And funnily enough, Al Gore Jr. as a boy was involved in these faux cattle sales as well.
The film then takes us through Al Gore Jr.’s youth spent living in a luxurious Washington, DC hotel with his mother, as the son of a powerful Democratic senator, all the while being groomed carefully by his parents to one day become a powerful US politician in his own right.
Gilbert takes us through Gore Jr.’s days at the prestigious St. Albans school in Washington – alma mater of many scions of powerful Washington political figures. He was a middling student, but took part in all the right activities to pad his resume for higher office. Gilbert notes that Gore Jr. was known to “rat out” fellow students for smoking and drinking, although Gore Jr. would later go on to Harvard, where he essentially became a stoner, drifting through courses, mostly earning C’s.
It was at Harvard where Gore Jr. would latch on to one of the keys to his great climate deception in his later years. He took a course by a professor named Roger Revelle. Gore would later claim that this course, and Revelle’s views on global warming, would form the foundation for Gore’s own crusade to “save the planet” from climate change doom.
In reality, as Gilbert discovers through his intensive research of Revelle’s documents from his 40-year career, stored at the University of California, San Diego, Revelle himself was not a climate alarmist. In fact, Revelle took issue with the Chicken Little global warming doomsayers like Al Gore in the decades after Gore took up the cause, saying that climate models were far too imperfect to make reliable predictions on the impact of C02 on the planet. Moreover, Revelle often wrote that there was not nearly enough data available to ascertain whether C02 had a positive or negative, or indeed any, affect on the planet’s climate. The climate system is far too complex, impacted by clouds, sunspots, ocean currents, and many other factors to be able to parse out C02’s effects.
Although Al Gore Jr. would often claim that it was his course with Revelle at Harvard that “opened his eyes” to the dangers of burning fossil fuels, Gilbert reveals that the course Gore took with Revelle, titled “Human Populations and Natural Resources,” had nothing to do with climate.
What Gilbert shows is the actual academic work that became the foundation of Gore’s climate thinking, occurred when he was at Vanderbilt Divinity School and read a book called “Our Plundered Planet,” written be a zoologist named Fairfield Osborn. Gore’s climate manifesto, “Earth in the Balance” was based on this book, and Gore would crib from this work in his speeches on climate change for years to come.
Gilbert’s new movie is an entertaining and eye-opening glimpse into the climate change hoax and Al Gore’s role, through deceit and self-aggrandizement, in nurturing this pseudoscience into a full-blown global cult that bears far more resemblance to religion than to any actual science.
If we must face the prospect of a President Kamala Harris, Americans would do well to see The Climate According to AI Al Gore, in order to understand the true foundation for what is sure to be a major Harris Administration policy agenda.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 35 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist and other publications. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)