The record-warm winters, the baking hot summers — some dry, others filled with historic floods from “extraordinary rain events” — have a lot of people ready to lecture each other on when these “just as predicted” consequences of climat change popped up on our cultural radars.

Wags will point to this series of print stories, that bit of NASA science-backed alarm or Al Gore’s culturally divisive documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

That 2006 two time Oscar winner from director Davis Guggenheim marked a moment in time when nearly everyone could force themselves to admit “Well, we were warned.”

Unfortunately, what that film really marked with the great divide between those able to grasp and reason with hard, ugly facts and the know-nothings of the the alt-conservative universe, back by the aren’t-ageing-well lies of the fossil fuel lobby, who dug in their heels for further decades of denying what was becoming obvious to anybody with a memory and two eyes to watch was what happening all around us.

Start with the knee-jerk hatred that inflamed that corner of the culture for Al Gore, probably the legitimate president in 2000 and not the accident-prone big oil-bought numbskull G.W. Bush, and it was inevitable that “climate change” became the irrational “woke” buzzphrase of its day, beaten into the simpletons unable to discern facts from Fox News.

But like Gore, I remember the filmed warning about what was to come thanks to a fossil fuel/deforestation driven warming planet. It was on public TV 17 years BEFORE “An Inconvenient Truth.”

As I scrolled through the memes and lectures aimed at the Texas weather disaster — yeah, let the oligarchs defund FEMA — and those acting shocked SHOCKED at what is happening on Bluesky today, I hunted down James Burke’s “After the Warming,” a 1989 two-part doc for public TV (in the US and UK) in which he depicted a 2050 where some of the worst climate changed disaster had happened, and what the smarter, more proactive and progressive leaders of Earth were doing about it.

Ironically, one of the first links served up by the dubiously biased Google Search, was this unsigned screed of utter BS from the professional liars at The Energy Advocate. Printed eight years AFTER the programs aired, this “review” is not aging well, and I daresay your kids are relieved you didn’t sign your name to it, Coal Porter.

The just-concluced warmest year in recorded history made every word of that 1997 screed a lie.

I’d track down Burke’s special any time I noticed the changing sea life (different species of barnacles growing on my boat hull), longer fire seasons, dryer summers — interrupted by lots of hurricanes — shifts in the climate of Florida during my 20-odd years living there.

Check it out below. It’s still alarming, even if not every worst-case-scenario has come to pass.

If we’d started listening to reason and voting against paid-off climate change deniers back then, none of us would have had to deal with irrational, ignorant Al Gore haters when he gave voice to the obvious in “An Inconvenient Truth” 17 years after “After the Warming.”