Well, the whole crops-withering-and-animals-going-extinct thing was always a little amusing. In plain English, the question "What would happen if the average temperature were 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter 100 years from now?" is answered with a shrug of a farmer's shoulders. Nothing.
It wasn't a bad scam, though, as long as it lasted, and that was long enough to put Algore in a very nice, high-carbon-footprint mansion. IIRC, phrenology lasted about 30 years before it got hooted off the scientific stage. Not a bad run at all.
That doesn't mean we won't hear shrieks of impending doom every time the summer is a hot one in Cambridge, Ithaca, Madison, Austin, or Berkeley. Or, for that matter, Washington D.C., wherein everything including human life is weighed in the calculus of political power. We haven't heard the last of the snake-oil salesmen, and they're still after our collective wallet.
The question they never seemed to have asked themselves as they predicted calamity is that if the earth was at one time much warmer than it is now (and it was), why are we and all the other flora and fauna still here instead of having died a scorching death millions of years ago? Or even as recent as about one thousand years ago.