Former Vice President Al Gore told a Hollywood audience Thursday that a collapse of the Atlantic current system that warms Europe is "a very real threat within the next 25 years," reviving the disaster scenario depicted in the 2004 film "The Day After Tomorrow" on the 20th anniversary of his climate documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
A peer-reviewed study published in Nature in February 2025 concluded that such a collapse is unlikely before 2100, placing Gore's timeline at the aggressive end of current science.
Gore, 78, spoke April 23 at the inaugural Sustainability in Entertainment Honors at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, an event co-hosted by The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance.
He shared the stage with actor Bradley Whitford of "The West Wing" for a keynote tied to the documentary's anniversary.
Citing what he described as a recent British newspaper report, Gore said scientists had found "yet more confirmatory information" that a shutdown of the Gulf Stream poses "a very real threat within the next 25 years."
Whitford suggested the consequences could put the world "in an ice age in, like, 10 years." Gore pushed back on the shorter timeline, saying it would take longer, but warned the result "would be bad on a scale that is beyond anything we can compare it to today."
Throughout the exchange, Gore referred to the 2004 disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow" as "The Day After," the title of a separate 1983 television film about nuclear war.
Gore's science is contested.
A study led by U.K. Met Office oceanographer Jonathan Baker, published in Nature in February 2025, ran 34 climate models under extreme greenhouse gas and freshwater scenarios and found no full collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, before 2100.
The authors concluded that wind-driven upwelling in the Southern Ocean would sustain a weakened circulation.
A 2023 Nature Communications paper argued the risk is greater and could materialize mid-century, leaving an active scientific dispute over how close the system is to a tipping point.
The remarks land as "An Inconvenient Truth" faces renewed scrutiny on its 20th anniversary.
In a December 2009 speech at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Gore said models suggested a 75% chance the Arctic could be largely ice-free during some summer months within five to seven years.
The researcher he cited, Naval Postgraduate School oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski, told The Times of London the next day that it was unclear how the figure had been derived.
Arctic summer sea ice has declined sharply but has not disappeared.
In a March 2026 podcast interview with The Bulwark, Gore said the documentary's warnings "were proven dead right."
At the Bel-Air event, Gore framed the political stakes, saying the United States is in "a climate policy recession right now because of the current U.S. president, mainly, and because of the massive spending and lobbying by the fossil fuel polluters."
Jim Thomas ✉
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor's degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.