Thanks to Sister Toldjah, I found this wonderful video:
It seems that our former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, Jr, thinks that the temperature at the core of the earth is “seveal million degrees.” (Around 42 seconds into the video.) Uh, no. Estimates vary, but are generally around 4000 to 6000º C. The higher end of that range would put the core at a temperature similar to that of the surface of the sun.
But several million degrees? No wonder he thinks we have global warming! Yet he expects us to trust his judgement on these things.
Aside from that humorous error on his part, I was interested in his notion that using geothermal energy was somehow recent. I worked at concrete plants in the mid-1980s which used geothermal systems to heat and cool water for concrete. The temperature of the ground just a few meters down is fairly constant, and the use of refrigerants to extract that heat energy is simply not a new thing. It’s a form of a heat pump, with which a lot of people are familiar as a heating and air conditioning source, but because the ground temperature is relatively constant, geothermal units are more effective; think of a heat pump trying to draw heat in for your home when it’s below freezing.
From Wikipedia:
In 1892, America’s first district heating system in Boise, Idaho was powered directly by geothermal energy, and was copied in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1900. A deep geothermal well was used to heat greenhouses in Boise in 1926, and geysers were used to heat greenhouses in Iceland and Tuscany at about the same time.[28] Charlie Lieb developed the first downhole heat exchanger in 1930 to heat his house. Steam and hot water from geysers began heating homes in Iceland starting in 1943.
The idea of using geothermal energy is not exactly new; it was used in ancient times to heat Roman baths!
Our former Vice President reminds me of the kid who hears something, maybe just in passing, and thinks he has Heard Something New. It then doesn’t take a long time before he says something ingorant, because he really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Maybe the core melted his “lock box”
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1999/PhillipChan.shtml
This Must put a dent in Algore’s diatribes
Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
11/19/2009
Stagnating Temperatures
Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
By Gerald Traufetter
Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
There is no controlling logical intelligence.
Oops. Several million, several thousand, to a politician not much difference. You know, kinda like billions and trillions.
jcw wrote:
[slapping forehead] Dang, why didn’t I think of that?
In fairness, Dana, Gore’s probably talking about the use of geothermal energy to drive a steam turbine to generate electricity directly, which is a fairly recent idea as far as I know. It generally requires drilling (baby, drilling) far deeper into the Earth in order to recover the heat directly from the molten rock below the crust. It’s pretty capital-intensive at the outset, as you can imagine, but in theory wouldn’t be all that expensive to run since all it would require to run is water to drive the turbine.
However, geothermal heat pumps and direct hot water heating are both economically sensible right now (though heavily geographically dependent), while I don’t think the same can be said for geothermal electricity…
It’s starting to look like Global Scamming may be a Hoax. Russian Hackers broke into the Climate Research Unit in London and made away with 62 MB of emails detailing not so great info on the scamming.
http://www.climatedepot.com/
And for balance:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
York, yep, looks like Smug Albert’s chickens are in tight formation centered on the localizer beam and just about to intersect with glide-slope.