Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

Let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship

By Jon Miltimore of FEE.

"While speaking at a climate change summit in Denmark in 2009, former Vice President Al Gore made an alarming statement.

Citing research from Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor of oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, Mr. Gore said it was likely that the north polar ice caps would soon be completely melted.

"These figures are fresh,” Mr. Gore said. “Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore cited studies which said “in the next 50 to 70 years” the ice caps would be completely melted. What had caused the melting to suddenly increase by a factor of ten? Well, nothing. As NPR noted, Mr. Gore was misrepresenting the data of Maslowski.

"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," Dr. Maslowski told The Times UK. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."

Gore’s office soon issued a statement saying the 75 percent figure was a "ballpark figure" Dr. Maslowski had used in a casual conversation with Gore several years earlier.

Fortunately, both Gore and Maslowski were wrong.

In 2021, the Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers, about 11 percent more than the 4.16 million kilometers in 2007, according to NASA’s estimates.*

Stretching the Truth

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data—or “spreading “misinformation.”

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion,” NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way—at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs."