This is mind blowing ignorance on the part of Al Gore. Gore in an 11/12/09 interview on NBC’s tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, speaking on geothermal energy, champion of slide show science, can’t even get the temperature of earth’s mantle right, claiming “several million degrees” at “2 kilometers or so down”. Oh, and the “crust of the earth is hot” too.
Temperature of the sun’s corona: 1–2 million kelvin
Temperature of the sun’s photosphere: 6,000 kelvin
Temperature of the Earths mantle, more than “2 kilometers or so down”: between 500 °C to 900 °C (773 to 1173 kelvin)
Watching Gore make a complete scientific idiot of himself on national TV: priceless
Don’t believe me? Watch the video from NBC below:
For a faster presentation, without a pre-viewing commercial, here is the same video on YouTube
Oh…and here is a graph of the vertical temperature profile with drilling depth:
And here is the temperature profile of the Earth’s crust, mantle, and core:
Source: Electropaedia (Mpower UK) page on geothermal energy
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This is one of the most lucid and accurate things he has ever said. Except for the temperature number it isn’t even stupid.
Two km = 6,561 feet. Many oil fields are twice that depth and more… a million degrees? Mind boggling.
Damn, all those new models based on Gores 2,000,000 degrees will have to have their ‘settled science’ outputs modified by feedbacks now to keep their outputs consistent.
Quite a blooper ! Using geothermal heat seems to work more in theory than practise. Here in Australia the listed companies have been testing the patience of their shareholders for years either loosing their drill bits or the ‘hot spots’ are in very remote locations away from the grid. Bit like the promise of wave energy, abundant, available 24/7,great idea but the engineering proved too difficult.
Remove the subsidies and they both collapse.
Why does any ‘respectable’ TV channel give this certifiable fool any air-time at all?
Doesn’t ANYONE check what piffle he utters? Why is this buffoon not mocked by journalists around the world?
“Several MILLION degrees” only two kilometres down from the earth’s surface???
What codswallop!!
One thing you can say, Al Gore sure isn’t a scientist. Not very smart either.
Looney tunes.
OK, you got him here. It did sound like he said million degrees.
That aside, geothermal energy is probably a bit underexploited. I think (not entirely sure) that the cost of digging holes has gone down, so the hot rocks needn’t be very close to the surface for the operation to be viable.
Thankfully Al baby is as wrong about Earth’s internal temperatures as he is about climate change. I guess he is too stupid to realise that if what he said was true than the ground would be a little too hot for us to risk putting our feet on it – like a million degrees or so.
Where does Gore get the idea that there is only 35,000 years of energy available? The use of geothermal energy causes no measurable depletion , excepting shallow, isolated geothermal pockets.
Wonderful to see the leader of the alarmist masses making a fool of himself.
Here’s a youtube link to the same video:
carrot eater, the cost of drilling may be less, but the difficulties in drilling over 5km into granite are huge. One company here in Australia had big problems drilling the first hole in their attempt to prove the concept & establish a demonstration power plant. That was months ago, they have not been in the news recently.
I like the bits that can withstand those million degree temperatures.
BTW, geothermal can be incredibly polluting if not done properly. And in many really hot spots, like Hawaii, the pollution was extremely difficult to control. Aerated heavy metals.
But but…. He is the President of the Planet!
In other news, the mainstream media are starting to go with the flow. I’m seeing more and more skeptical articles, particularly I think, in response to the avalanche of skeptical comments they keep getting in their warmist articles. I suppose it’s a kind-of democracy, isn’t it?
For some facts on geothermal energy.
http://www.geo-energy.org/
Another geothermal energy fact source:
http://www.geothermal.org/
The sweet irony of this tiny glimpse of the real Gore, when ocntrasted with the propaganda piece by Newsweak, is delightful.
The cover story on Al Gore in Newsweak this week is, I kid you not:
” The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man”
http://ksjtracker.mit.edu/2009/11/02/newsweek-gore-has-a-new-book-out-just-in-time-for-copenhagen-and-speaking-of-global-things/
Fiction cannot be stranger or more entertaining than fact, especially when bloviating self-declared genius con-artists are concerned.
This is more scary than funny. It just shows that Al Gore, author of an inconvenient truth understands NOTHING about basic physics. He just repeats what he has been told and he’s not even smart enough to do that right.
Shocking!
What a maroon.
A good illustration of the difference between “knowledge” and “intelligence.”
The former refers to the ability to remember facts, figures, and events. The latter refers to the ability to figure out what those facts, figures, and events actually mean: determining which are most relevant to testing hypotheses, drawing the proper logical conclusions from them, etc. If you can recite Pi to the 1000th digit, it doesn’t make you “smart” – it just means you have a good memory.
I don’t judge too much about a person from their ability (or inability) to remember exact figures off the cuff (same reason I think the reaction to Sarah Palin’s inability to cite a Supreme Court case she disagreed with was overblown – pretty easy to slip up like that when you’re speaking or put on the spot).
Now, if Gore’s mistake had been a written statement, we’d have a different issue on our hands: evidence of sloppy fact checking.
I think this fits right in with his previous statements about exaggeration being ok to achieve his goals. But it would seem he went more than a little overboard with this one. I wonder if he’s had a CAT scan recently?
RICH (14:43:08) :
What a maroon.
Why are you insultative to maroons?
One of my friends is a many times member of the 5 mile club. In Oklahoma many oil wells hit over 25,000 feet. The temps go up and at 70,000 feet are above boiling temp.
The deepest mines worked by humans are 3.9km deep – Gold mines in South Africa. It’s pretty hot down there (rock face temperature 60 degC) and they need a lot of cooling – but millions of degrees?! The guy is just making it up.
The saddest part of this interview is the fulsome applause he gets at the end of the interview, which is just a shameless plug for his book anyway.