There’s a little bit of buzz burbling around over Al Gore’s
scientific goof during a Conan O’Brien interview. Discussing
geothermal energy, he said the following: It definitely is, and
it’s a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy
— when they think about it at all — in terms of the hot water
bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in
most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, ’cause the
interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees,
and the crust of the earth is hot … Of course the interior of
the earth is extremely hot, but not that hot. It’s several
thousand degrees rather than several million. If the earth were
several million degrees it would be a rapidly diffusing cloud of
metallic vapor. Even the center of the sun is only perhaps 13
million degrees C. But I’ll let him slide; pretty much everyone
blanks out from time to time. And it gives us a chance to do a
little thinking about just how much thermal energy is in the
earth. First of all, just