The Highwire with Del Bigtree - WAS ‘AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH’ A VERY CONVENIENT LIE?

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Jefferey looks back at the 20-year legacy of “An Inconvenient Truth” highlighting long-standing factual disputes, court rulings on bias, and how climate narratives have been used to justify sweeping policies. Hear new research on polar bears, natural climate cycles, and the emerging risks of AI-engineered viruses—raising questions about which threats are real and which are manufactured through narrative.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We're upon an anniversary, just came and went, 20 years of an inconvenient lie. I guess you want to talk about it when it comes to Al Gore's inconvenient truth. His documentary won an Oscar for it. It was all over the place. And at this point, we look back on it now, and here are the headlines. Two decades of inconvenient inaccuracies.

And why are we always beating this drum here? Because this painted, it's about narratives. I mean, we live through COVID. We saw how narratives allowed lock lockdowns, forced vaccination. I mean, all of it. I don't have to go through it. The narrative of climate change, really Al Gore was the jet fuel. The inconvenient truth was the jet fuel that drove this home into the minds of children and into the minds. I mean, he was a documentary filmmaker. He made this documentary. And so a lot of people didn't know, but he was sued by the

high court in the UK and lost because there were so many inaccuracies. In 2009, here's the headline here, an inconvenient verdict for Al Gore. So he lost there because in the the UK, you can't put this forward, especially the school children, and be biased and basically lie to them. So of course, schools, this is the headline, must warn of Gore climate film bias. So they had to, when they played these films in school, if you were in the UK, you had to get a list of all of the bias inaccuracies of this film because this court ruling. Here's a list of them. I mean, there's over 10 of them, but we can go through a couple.

The first one, the film claims that melting snow on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming, government's expert was forced to concede that that is not correct. Number five, the film claims that the study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing Arctic ice. It turned out Mr. Gore had misread the study, in fact, four polar bears drowned. And this was because of a particularly violent storm. You go to the bottom, the film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering it melting. The evidence was that it is, fact-increasing. So you go through. The kids now have to sit down and basically get fact-checked because of a court order because this guy can't do a proper document. It takes five seconds to fact check this stuff. But let's keep going on these fact checks, because this is another narrative that it's really starting to turn fast. Well, again, I'm going to do the same caveat I do every time, Jeffrey. I want clean air, I want clean water, I want a clean food supply, all of those things. I consider myself environmentalists, but I do not agree when these things start being used

as trigger points for authoritarian control, which is what this is. with all the carbon credit stores, the WEF and the WHO. So when we're reporting on this, I want to make it clear to everyone out there, you know, let's try to clean up our environment. It's good for all of us, but we should do it in ways that makes sense, and certainly not by destroying our economies and our ability to walk amongst each other or have jobs. Right. And I think we can all agree conservation is a big thing, especially stopping environmental toxins, which we know are leading to this chronic disease epidemic.

This is a main contributor to this. And so I want to go into the conversation about polar bears because a new study just came out. They were looking at this polar bear conversation. And for all the people that were sad and crying that the polar bears were drowning and dying and were losing them in this earth where they're going to become extinct, here's the headline polar bears getting fatter and healthier amid ice loss. Researchers weighed and measured and measured 770 adults in Spallbird between 1992 and 2019

and found that bears had become significantly fatter, which means healthier. think that smaller bears have adapted to recent ice loss by eating more land-based prey, including reindeer and walruses. So there you go. Now, over the past couple weeks here in the United States, we've received a huge Arctic blast. Some say it's the biggest one in 40 years, and the conversation about an ice age has come about. It's come back around full circle. You see headlines like this. This was just over a month ago right before it happened. Global warming could trigger the next ice age. It's a silent science daily. But we have a conversation from A professor, his name is Andres Bourne.

He was basically asked about this in an article, when will the next Ice Age come? And he's at the University of Bergen Department of Earth Science, and he studies past climates. And he says this, next Ice Age will probably not begin for another 50,000 years, says Born. Researchers have arrived at slightly different estimates. If we disregard human influence,

the current interglacial period is estimated to last between 10,000 and 50,000 more years. We are therefore living in an interglacial period that is unusually long. That's basically the warm phase between the glaciers. So we're in this warm phase sandwich between these two ice ages. But this ice age he's saying is very long, tens of thousands of years long. So he goes on to even talk about more of the what the Earth's doing this elliptical orbit. He says the reason the intercalatial period is especially long is because of natural fluctuations in something called the McClanovic

cycles, says Boren. These are changes in the Earth's orbit from circular to elliptical, as well as changes in the Earth's tilt and wobble, which affects solar radiation. These cycles have periods of 100,000, 41,000, 17,000, and 21,000 years. They control the timing of the ice ages and interglacial periods, along with feedback mechanisms in the climate system. So that's a pretty big. Well, I mean, just gigantic enormous elements that human beings have no control over, right? The in how our orbit is working, the wobbling of the Earth's sun. I mean, these are things when we get so egocentric that human beings are these just giant power sources,

really enough to overcome changes in our orbit, in our wabbling, in our distance to the sun and its power. I mean, it puts it all into a little bit of perspective. In those numbers, right? Hundreds of thousands of years, tens of thousands of years. You know, it's humbling. in all the right ways. Yeah, and we're talking about galactic prime movers here.

And so what about people? Well, he goes on to say this. He says, an important factor for when the next ice age will come is greenhouse gas emissions. The CO2 content in the atmosphere has increased and the planet has become warmer. He says these estimates that with the emissions we have already had, the next ice age will be delayed by at least 120,000 years from today,

perhaps as much as 200,000 years, he said. So depending on your perspective, he's saying global warming in this case is actually good when it comes to saving off an ice age that's going to bury us under thousands of feet of ice. It's time for, I think, a message in a bottle to our, you know, kin out there 200,000 years from now. You're welcome. We did our best. So, well, when it comes to this climate conversation, because it's existential, it's eaten every topic we know. also pandemics, they're not sacred here. And so we have the Lancet, remember Lancet, the journal Nature.

These are the people that said natural immunity wasn't a big deal during COVID. These people that said natural origins is where the pandemic came from from bats. Well, they also say climate change and pandemics, a call for action. So they're saying climate change is going to exacerbate and make so many more pandemics, just like we saw with COVID. And so that conversation now is interesting because as everyone is taught to look at the horizon for climate change caused pandemics, there's actually researchers from private companies that are doing way more dangerous work than what's happening with the climate right now when it

comes to pandemics. Take a look at this headline. This is out of the Daily Mail. It says, lab grown life takes a major step forward as scientists use AI to create virus never before seen. They talked to one of the researchers at this private company doing this. Dr. Wolfson told the Daily Mail for at least four billion years, all life on earth has evolved by the trial and error process of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, which lacks any foresight or intention. He goes on to say natural evolution now as a co-author, and it's people, it's humans. They're jumping into this space with artificial intelligence. So let's replace the lack of natural intention and foresight with something we have no foresight on

and is not natural at all. AI, let's just put, I mean, honestly, Jeffrey, that might be the most terrifying headline I've seen. Let's just put AI. AI and nature together. Let's just let the chips fall where they may. What could possibly go wrong? Right. I mean, all of this, it's assuming that there's no creator. Okay, that's fine.

But it's also assuming that trial and error process that nature has. There's no kind of wisdom in that that keeps superbugs for just being made every week. There's a lot of questions here. And again, you have states, you have countries. They're falling way behind on trying to regulate. these things and it's not just states and countries that are doing this. These are private organizations. These are the organizations that are willing to sit down with the Daily Mail and have a

conversation. What about the Wuhan labs out there that are outside the purview of our journalists and of our governments? What are they doing with artificial intelligence when it comes to virus creation? It's a huge, huge questions. This is 21st, 22nd century stuff here, but it needs to be answered now. Yeah, immediately. I mean, this is really terrifying.

Imagine just putting AI in a lab. in a lab and saying grow whatever virus you can, any bacteria you can. And by the way, see if you like humanity at all. And don't let that affect any of the work that you're doing, at least not without telling us first.