Well, no. He emphasized the word "millions’ too much for me to believe he meant “thousands” instead. And if he is flogging geothermal as a realistic, long-term solution, then he had better get the basic facts right if he wants me to accept his conclusion.
Is what he claimed about drill bits melting if you drill too deep in the earth correct? Was that the only limiting factor in transforming our whole economy to use geothermal? Where did he get the 35,000 years of energy quote?
If he was wrong about the temperature, maybe he was wrong about other stuff as well.
A few million degrees is a dumbass guess but he wasn’t really pressed on it and just tossed the number out there so who knows the answer he would’ve put on a test.
Oh, sure, it’s funny now. Until he does become president, and the Earth’s core stops spinning and he won’t authorize a trip to the center of the Earth to detonate a nuclear bomb, because he thinks the mantle’s temperature is several million degrees. It won’t be funny then.
Come on. This is absurd. Gore made a basic error, but he’s better-read on most of these issues than the average politician. Lord knows I’m not an Al Gore fan, but leaping on this one error as though it is anything meaningful is ridiculous.
No drill “bit” has ever come close to reaching the mantle. However, industrial drill bits melt regularly due to friction - water and other fluids are used to cool them, but if the flow is interrupted or something fails the drill can melt.
If he were submitting a paper with this error, and it wasn’t a clear typo, it would get rejected. If he were doing the science, I’d worry. In fact he is doing PR for the environment, a very important job, and is transmitting other peoples’ conclusions. I’ve seen what marketing people do to things written by technical people.“TapDance works by algorithms!” (True sentence written by marketing for one of our products.) Gore does a very good job for a politician, and clearly has learned a lot of stuff. But he isn’t and doesn’t claim to be a scientist.
