There is One Goddess Gaia and Al Gore is Her Prophet

Here's Al Gore at it again, making insane claims on the Conan O'Brien show the other night. The Earth's interior is several MILLION DEGREES, Al? Seriously? I mean, who knows if geothermal energy makes any sense to pursue, but its credibility gets undermined when Earth-worshiping nutbags like Al Gore just make up huge numbers as they go along. The fact is that the inside of the Earth never gets more than several THOUSAND degrees celsius. How stupid do you have to be to believe that we can live only "several kilometers" from a core that is "several million degrees" hot? Is it more disturbing that one of the environmental "elites" like Al Gore goes around believeing and spouting such nonsense unchalleneged... or that so many people believe him?

The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25–50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that's a mile and a quarter if you're not as science-y as Al) you'll have an average gain of 30–60 degrees — exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it's much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was "several million degrees," we'd be a star.

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