Former US Vice President Al Gore is warning that global warming could trigger cooling, a return to one of the most paradoxical risks he raised nearly 20 years ago in An Inconvenient Truth.
Speaking at a Hollywood Reporter event marking the documentary’s 20th anniversary, Gore connected current warming, Greenland ice loss, and the threat of a weakened Gulf Stream system.
“Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour, night and day,” Gore said, before warning that if the Gulf Stream “ceases to exist as we know it,” the consequences would be severe.
The exchange became more dramatic when the host summarized the scenario as, “we’re in an ice age in like 10 years.” Gore immediately qualified the line. “No, no, no. It would take a long… I mean I’m not giving you the I-wear-makeup version,” he said. “But it would be bad. It would be very bad and would be bad on a scale that is beyond anything we can compare it to today.”
Gore described a regional climate shock tied to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a system of ocean currents that NOAA says moves warm water north and cold water south through the Atlantic.
The IPCC says the AMOC is “very likely” to decline over the 21st century under all modeled emissions scenarios, while expressing medium confidence that the weakening will not involve an abrupt collapse before 2100. Its ocean and cryosphere report also says substantial weakening remains physically plausible, even though a collapse this century is assessed as very unlikely.
Gore’s framing closely tracks what he said in An Inconvenient Truth. In the 2006 film, he described the North Atlantic as an area scientists were watching because the Gulf Stream carries heat toward western Europe. “They call it the ocean conveyor,” Gore said in the film transcript, explaining that cold, salty water sinks and pulls the current back south.
The documentary also described a past disruption when freshwater diluted the North Atlantic, making dense water “fresher and lighter so it stopped sinking.” Gore said then that “the pump shut off and the heat transfer stopped, and Europe went back into an ice age for another 900 or 1000 years,” adding that the transition may have happened “in perhaps as little as 10 years time.”
But he also included a caveat: “Of course that’s not going to happen again, because the glaciers of North America are not there,” before pointing to Greenland as the remaining major ice concern.
In the recent interview at the Sustainability in Entertainment Honors event, Gore updated the same argument with current figures and a broader warning about tipping points. He said “100% of Georgia is in drought,” claimed “61% of the entire land mass of the whole world last year had at least one month of extreme drought,” and said extreme wildfires worldwide “have doubled in the last 20 years.”
He also argued that rising heat and humidity could make more regions “physiologically unlivable,” citing a warning that the world could see more than 1 billion climate migrants by 2050.
The cooling risk is also geographically specific. Research summarized by Utrecht University says that if the Gulf Stream weakens significantly, Europe could become “the odd one out on a warming planet,” warming less than other regions or even becoming colder, especially in winter, while the rest of the world continues to warm.
Recent research has also sharpened concern around AMOC instability. Carbon Brief’s 2026 explainer notes that warming seas, melting ice, and increased rainfall can upset the temperature and salt balance of the North Atlantic, while a 2026 Nature Communications Earth & Environment paper said there is growing evidence the present-day AMOC is weakening under climate change and may be “on route to tipping.”
Gore paired the warning with a defense of climate solutions, arguing that the energy transition has moved faster than expected. He said global solar capacity rose from “seven gigawatts” in 2006 to “2,930 gigawatts” this year, and claimed that in December, “29% of all cars sold worldwide were EVs.” He also said that “92.7%” of new US electricity generation installed last year came from solar, wind, and batteries when rooftop solar is included.
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