Lucky old Americans. They only had to put up with one fruitcake as president, in Donald Trump. It could have been worse. But for a few hanging chads in Florida in the 2000 Presidential election, they could have ended up with Al Gore.

It isn’t just the hanging chads, though, that have become unhinged, but Gore himself. In an extraordinary speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, an increasingly crimson Gore angrily berated the rest of the world – Greta Thunberg and other youthful activists excepted – for failing to realise just how close we are to climate apocalypse. ‘People are familiar with the thin blue line which astronauts bring back in their pictures from space,’ he began. ‘That’s the part of the atmosphere which has the oxygen and it’s only 5 to 7 km thick. That’s what we are using as an open sewer.’

The trouble is, Gore’s own grip on science doesn’t seem all that great

Actually, the troposphere is twice that thick, and there is plenty of oxygen in the much-thicker stratosphere which lies above it. If there wasn’t, Gore would never have made it to Davos – his jet would have plunged to the ground as its engines spluttered and died. But let’s leave that aside.

Gore went on to claim that the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere was trapping as much heat ‘as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima bombs released on Earth every day. That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts and melting the ice’. His Hiroshima comparison seems to have come from a calculation made by the Guardian, and others, of the warming of the oceans in a single year.

But the problem with Hiroshima, needless to say, wasn’t so much the amount of energy as its concentration. If you want to compare the amount of solar energy which is received by the Earth every day with the Hiroshima bomb it is something like 500 trillion times as much. Concentrate that energy in one place and you could certainly boil Al Gore’s head, but boiling oceans? Observational data has yet to produce an example of oceans being brought to boiling point by the heat from the sun.

But Gore wasn’t finished there. He claimed climate change was going to generate a billion refugees and result in us ‘losing our capacity for self-government’. How he came by this figure, he didn’t quite say. He went on to claim that the World Bank is ‘led by a climate denier’. Actually, David Malpass, who holds that position, told CNN in 2019: ‘It’s clear that greenhouse gas emissions are coming from manmade sources, including fossil fuels, methane, agricultural uses and industrial uses, and so we’re working hard to change that’.

Gore seems to have settled on his view of Malpass thanks to the latter replying ‘I’m not a climate scientist’ when Gore personally tried to get him to agree to statements on the climate. I know from personal experience Al Gore’s tendency to call you a denier if you dare challenge anything says – he used the same ruse with me when I interviewed him in 2017.

The trouble is, Gore’s own grip on science doesn’t seem all that great. His previous apocalyptic visions have proved somewhat wide of the mark, such as predicting in 2006 that the snows of Kilimanjaro would be gone by 2020 – they are still there, with climbers reporting glaciers ‘the size of a house’. Nor, indeed, does Gore’s personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions seem to match his apocalyptic language. At least his hero, Greta Thunberg, whom he name-checked several times at Davos, practices what he preaches. As well as Gore’s frequent flying, his Tennessee house was revealed in 2007 to be consuming 20 times as much as the average US home. If he wants to berate the world over climate change, he ought to get out a large whip and start with himself.