Gore vs. Quayle

The High Priest of Gaia was on Conan the other day and coughed up this amazing factoid:



Whew. The core of the Sun has a temperature of millions of degrees, but Earth sits at about five thousand degrees, so he's only off by three orders of magnitude or so. For you liberal readers, that's science lingo for "a lot." And most geothermal systems work with a temperature difference of less than a hundred degrees (and do so with remarkable efficiency; Southern Man is considering geothermal for his yet-to-be-constructed home out on The Land). But Southern Man is not surprised by such a mis-statement. In science-and-society courses Professor Southern Man routinely mined examples of pseudoscience, junk science, and twisted logic from his much-highlighted copy of Gore's Earth In The Balance, a thoroughly unscientific tome that has been shredded to bits by far smarter folk than he. And he is not surprised that this gaffe has gone entirely unreported other than on a handful of blogs. Lessee here: Dan Quayle can misspell "potatoe" and it's front-page news (mainly because a reporter was assigned by his editor to specifically watch for Quayle to commit an error, any error at all, so that it could be reported); Tina Fey can utter quips in a SNL skit that are later attibuted by "serious" journalists to Sarah Palin, but Gore can spout nonsense for decades and remain the darling of the mainstream media.

Here's a challenge for you. Google "Dan Quayle dumb quotes" and "Al Gore dumb quotes." The difference is...educational.