Al Gore is promoting using the heat of the earth’s center to generate energy. On Conan O’Brien he stated that “the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees.”
Gore is wrong by at least a factor of 1,000. The center of the Earth is about about 11,000 degrees Farenheit and the temperature at a depth of 50 to 60 miles is between 1,200 and 2,220 degrees Farenheit (see Wikipedia). Still hot, but one thousandth or less than Gore’s “several million degrees.”
Al Gore says we can drill about 2 miles into the crust, In most places it isn’t going to be very warm at 2 miles depth. Using geothermal energy is feasible only in areas with high levels of volcanic activity, i.e. areas where melting rock at a couple of thousand (NOT million) degrees spills to the earth’s surface.
Why does this matter?
Well, it is the same kind of exaggeration that made Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” such a sensation. Instead of quoting the UN Climate Change Panel’s consensus that sea levels may rise a few inches to up to two feet over the next 100 years, Al Gore demonstrated in the movie how places like South Florida would disappear if sea levels were to rise 20 feet. Good drama for a movie, but irrelevant to the debate on climate.
In the movie, he shows the correlation between the earth temperature and CO2 in the atmosphere from ice core studies, but fails to mention that temperature increased first followed by increases in CO2. Studies that shows that increases in temperature precede increases in CO2 rather than the other way around are a problem for the claim that man-made CO2 is causing temperature increases. Over the past century CO2 has increased from 280 to about 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. The earth has been warming for about 200 years after a 500 year episode known as the “Little Ice Age.”
The science of climatology is complex, but Al Gore will twist facts and exaggerate numbers to support his agenda of creating global government entities that would redistribute wealth, drastically interfere in people’s lives and threaten our sovereignty. If you challenge Gore and other climate change ideologues, you are a lunatic and compared to a Holocaust denier. Reason and facts are not welcome by the advocates of radical socialist policies.
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