Al Gore Claims Climate Change Will Cost U.S. To ‘Lose Our Capacity For Self-Governance’

Al Gore Claims Climate Change Will Cost U.S. To ‘Lose Our Capacity For Self-Governance’

Cullen McCue

Former vice president and longtime climate activist Al Gore told CNN that failure to take radical action on the issue could lead to one-billion refugees and cause the U.S. to “lose our capacity for self-governance.”

“[If] the world doesn’t act what what’s the worst-case scenario, the scientists who warned us of these mega storms and uh… the floods and mudslides and droughts. And then ice melting, and the sea level rising, and the storms getting stronger, and the tropical diseases and uh… climate migrants crossing international borders,” Gore told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“They warned us about this,” Gore went on to say in his gloomy analysis of the future. “And so we need to pay more attention to them now,” the former vice president continued before claiming that the United States and other Western nations could soon be dealing with one-billion “climate refugees.”

He contributed the rise of “dictatorships” and “populist authoritarianism” on this looming migration, adding that nations could ultimately lose their ability to govern themselves. Gore also claimed that the “survival of our civilization is at stake,” something he has been claiming for more than 30 years.

The former presidential nominee has long been credited with mainstreaming the idea of “global warming” into the public conscience. Messaging eventually shifted to “climate change” after a number of global warming doom predictions — many of which were advanced by Gore himself — failed to come to fruition.

While speaking at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, Gore saidthere was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”

Despite Gore’s bleak prediction, the Arctic ice cap has not been eliminated at any point over the last decade.

In his 2006 documentary titled An Inconvenient Truth, the former vice president predicted that the global sea level could rise as much as 20 feet “in the near future.” According to statistics from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the global sea level has increased by 8-9 inches since 1880. Between 1993 and 2001, sea levels rose by 3.8 inches.

At that rate, it would take 1,136 years for global sea levels to rise by 20 feet