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New Study Suggests Wind Farms Can Cause Climate Change
nachiketas writes "A study led by Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York concludes that large wind farms could noticeably impact local weather patterns. According to Professor Zhou: 'While converting wind's kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.'"
Who wrote that headline and how can we make him stop writing new ones.
We must stop this reliance on wind energy, which is causing such harm to the environment! Increased usage of this harmful wind pollution will inevitably result in a global climate catastrophe within the next century! We must start finding alternative fuels NOW!
This has been done to death already elsewhere. The bottom line is that increasing the surface temperature (at the expense of cooling the air) increases the thermal radiation into space and therefore has the overall bottom line effect of (very slightly) cooling the earth.
Do you have a lot of very large turbine farms in your area? Then possibly, but unlikely.
I've never understood why this issue is never discussed. You're taking energy out of the system, and wind from people downstream. Local weather patterns aren't closed systems.
Modifying wind patterns will very obviously have an effect on local climate. Local is the key word - these guys are talking about and increase of under one degree, directly above those wind farms, and it seems likely that this is caused by the small amounts of turbulence generated by the turbines.
Now, if evidence emerges that this is harmful in some way, then we should of course evaluate that and make sure we understand the effects. However, I think stating "Wind Farms Can Cause Climate Change" is clearly intended to sensationalise this research and attract page views - especially given The Telegraph's well-known rabid-anti-environmentalism (they're especially anti-wind-turbine.)
From TFA:
However Prof Zhou pointed out the most extreme changes were just at night and the overall changes may be smaller.
Also, it is much smaller than the estimated change caused by other factors such as man made global warming.
“Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes,” he added.
...
“This makes sense, since at night the ground becomes much cooler than the air just a few hundred meters above the surface, and the wind farms generate gentle turbulence near the ground that causes these to mix together, thus the ground doesn't get quite as cool. This same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers (who fly helicopters over the orchards rather than windmills) to combat early morning frosts.”
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Any removal of energy from the environment wlll affect the environment.
Solar energy capture reduces ground heating. Hyrdo capture reduces errosion and soil redistribution. Wind capture reduces winds and associated head and moisture distribution. Wave energy capture reduces shore errosion and fine particlate distribution. Tide capture does really really small scale stuff to the earth-moon-sun relationship.
You don't get anything for free. The question is what do we accept as side effects of the energy extraction.
All rational people understand that entropy exists and is always increasing. The point is not that humans can have an impact on climate and environment, the question is can we do things to minimize the impact.
For example, we replaced horse poop all over the city with leaded fuel exhaust. When we did not all live in cities, the horse poop was not so bad, but cars were better for cities. Then we realized that lead was not so good for us, so we took lead out. Then the exhaust was still not so good, so we made cars more efficient. These changes costs important people lots of money, so they were opposed by uncreative people with lots of money, but in the end we have more efficient transportation that do not leave piles of feces in the street.
So I read this report the other day, and my question is still the same. Would these locations prefer a windmill farm or coal fired plant. I ask this question because ultimately we cannot continue to reap the benefit of electricity production and outsource the consequences. It is expensive to do so. The question is not that does the new tech cause problems, but are those problems less than the old tech. I think it is arguably so.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They also extract energy from the athmosphere (I actually have no idea on how much).
But in the end all depends on how many wind farms will be deployed.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Cities cause local/regional climate change.
Plane travel collectively has a continent wide impact on cloud cover.
Face it, there are enough people that anything we do collectively has impact on the world.
Wouldn't this really just be the same effect as an equivalent area covered by large trees? Yes, it could slightly alter the climate, but any physical environment change will.
Anything that sticks out of the ground is going to have an impact on airflow and climate. We should demolish all buildings and trees and live underground. Lizard people figured this out centuries ago. That's why they live underground.
I predicted that one a few years ago. You can not take energy out of a system with out impacting the overall performance of the system.
Isn't one of the main purposes of using wind power to reverse the effects of global warming, in other words to change the climate?
Henceforth, it shall never be known as the butterfly effect again, it is now the wind farm effect.
This is a great boon to those looking for a reason to choose solar over wind.
We could ditch oil, coal, and nuclear entirely if we just build solar farms.
They're using their grammar skills there.
You know, there are large projects which involve planting trees along freeways to help reduce the noise of the vehicles passing through. And sometimes, in cities where the tall buildings grow, the streets are extremely windy because the streets, sans foliage, tend to channel and concentrate the flow of air as it rushes from high pressure to low pressure zones.
Trees and wind farms do tend to act against the constant shift of balance from high to low. And without them resisting (but not stopping) the flow of air, the changes become more gentle... at least near the surface... (Nothing is stopping the flows where the REAL weather is happening... up, thousands of feet above the surface of the ground.)
"You cannot take energy out of a system without impacting the performance of the system." Yeah... kinda true... sort of... but the thing that makes weather is discarded energy sent to us from the sun. The sun sends out its energy in limitless amounts. No amount of pin-wheels will change what the sun is doing and so the difference in potential which is where we get energy, will remain pretty much the same regardless of how much we are able to extract from it.
... change of climate (which is what I think TFA is implying, didn't read though) is not the same as "climate change".
Changes are made to a ecosystem and the ecosystem reacts to those changes, news at eleven.
http://www.epa.gov/hiri/ "The term "heat island" describes built up areas that are hotter than nearby rural areas. The annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8–5.4F (1–3C) warmer than its surroundings. In the evening, the difference can be as high as 22F (12C)." Great news story, I really feel clued in to the important issues of the day. *kills self*
Windfarms only cause apparent climate change when meteorologists have their thermometers on the ground. Mixing air of different temperatures doesn't heat it, not while the conservation of energy is valid.
I think this almost falls into the 'no shit, Sherlock' camp. I'm glad someone with credentials is finally saying it. Please pass it along to the geo-thermal guys, who seem to think that sucking energy from the inside of this planet will never have an effect. Oh, and the wave-power-generation guys need to know too - they'll be disturbing ecologies and water flow patterns for miles around - who knows how far those effects will cascade? Scale counts - oil consumption wasn't a problem until we scaled it out - the same fate awaits any terrestrial energy source we scale.
There are only two places to get energy: 1. Earth, 2. Not Earth. Given a choice, I'll choose 2.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Skyscrapers and any large man-made structures also have an effect on regional climate. Is this any different? At least with wind farms, we're not dumping high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and superheating the earth.
I don't know if you're just a troll, but obviously the energy content of the wind, particularly with respect to velocity and momentum, changes as the wind passes the turbine blades.
The wind is basically slowed down and that change in energy spins the turbine which then produces electricity. It is intuitively obvious that doing this on a large enough scale would change wind patterns enough to modify the local climate.
I also have nightmares about the valley of the living windmills.
To sum up your post: entropy is a bitch.
http://wou.edu/las/physci/taylor/g407/kondolf_97.pdf
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
This option doesn't emit carcinogens into our environment leading to health issues down the road.
It may cause climatological changes in the local area, but call me crazy for thinking I'd rather adapt to weather pattern changes than have my body try to adapt to carcinogens from current energy producing means.
Trees also slow the wind causing a LOCAL change. So should we also ban trees?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem
"An ecosystem is a biological system consisting of all the living organisms or biotic components in a particular area and the nonliving or abiotic component with which the organisms interact, such as air, mineral soil, water and sunlight."
Even if windmills are not living beings, they interact with wind that in turn interacts with living beings and other abiotic components. I'm no biologist but I think this is quite obvious.
And this same exact effect is also observed in a forest. And those areas where the wind farms are (except for off shore ones) used to have Huge old growth forests only a few hundred years ago if you are talking about the USA, 6000 years ago if you are talking europe, asia, middle-east, etc..
So what about the effect on climate from all those damned trees?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes ... As would, planting trees, growing crops, erecting a city. Anything you put there that isn't there now will change it somehow. Did we need a study to prove this?
We just need to accept the fact that we destroy, everything, on a regular basis with reckless abandon. Once we accept the fact that we're killing ourselves for profit, we'll live short but more content lives. ... and I don't really believe any of that. I just get annoyed at the shenanigans around trying to find happier alternatives to pillaging the planet for limited resources.
But... you have to build bypasses!
How about spinning skyscrapers?
Birds can kill themselves by flying into skyscraper windows and can get killed by windmills. So a spinning skyscraper would literally be killing two birds with one stone!
... might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate
In other news, jumping up and down on the spot might have noticable impacts on the temperature in your imediate area.
Does it imact global weather and climate, who cares... weve already been paid.
How about this: if, about 6000 years from now, we figure out that windmills are worst than trees, we'll cut them up to harvest the metal and plant new trees in their place.
A stretch of highway will have far more affect on climate than an entire wind farm. I live in the eastern end of the Phoenix metropolitan area and just driving 15 miles west in the summer can increase the temperature 10 degrees just from all the concrete and black top. The temperature difference they are talking about from windmills is minor. Black top causes major increases. If you want to reduce heat don't not build windmills make roads a lighter color. It's been discussed for years but there's no political will to do it.
You don't think wind moves through trees frictionlessly, do you?
So whatever wind energy gets turned to heat is "harvested" right? (In addition to photosynthesis).
And trees do NOT "turn wind energy into strutural integrity", they become stronger as a by-product of being stressed by wind. They actually are turning CO2, sunlight, water, and soil nutrients into structural integrity.
And I bet the fundamental point is correct, a bunch of trees probably absorb more wind energy via friction than windmills would generating energy.
--PM
Of course, duh! Who in the world ever imagined that producing energy at the scale needed for modern global consumption would not have an impact on its source or environment. The type of source is of little consequence.
The same, I'm sure, holds true for bio-fuels, fusion, and even solar power. $DEITY only knows what extreme changes will occur to the surface temperature of the planet if we ever figure out how to absorb large quantities of solar light as our primary energy source.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Then the wind farm might make it slightly warmer at night and slightly cooling during the day, due to stirring up the inversion layers and causing turbulence. Nothing here. Move on.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Cities with tall buildings affect wind patterns and the change in ground cover (bitumen roads instead of trees and grass) is known to produce local warming.
It seems reasonable that wind turbines would similarly affect wind patterns, and if the ground cover changed due to clearing trees, they might also affect radiation absorbtion.
There do seem to be a lot of complaints about subsonics emanating from those who have wind farms planted near to their homes. Perhaps government should finance some studies of the affect of such subsonics on health before allowing further plantations.
So, Smits creates habitat for orangutans, mostly by restoring diverse flora in formerly dismal/barren parts of Bornio.
They've noted significant changes to local (micro-)climate, ie, over their new plantations & living spaces, for both people & oran's.
Brief reports of the changes are to be heard in Smits' excellent TED talk on his purpose & means to restore habitat to these sensitive animals:
+ http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html
There may be some more details on the hows & outcomes, eg, in resources to be found here:
+ http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/03/learn_more_abou/
(For a few blog articles, search TED.com for "orangutans")
http://www.theonion.com/audio/wind-reserves-to-run-out-by-2036,13448/
The study talks about local temperature changes in the vicinity of wind-farms by comparing non-wind-farm areas very near by. This kind of invalidates the word climate in the headline as climate is global, not local. Weather is local. While the paper does say that if large enough, a wind farm could have a climatic effect, I'm assuming it would have to be an apolitically huge wind farm. The study also notes that the effect is small when compared to anthropogenic factors.
The reason fossil fuels are well known to cause climate change is the effect is, practically permenant since we are raising the level of the CO2. The CO2 will STILL BE THERE after we stop burning fossil fuels, even after we have depleted every bit of coal and oil, it will be in the atmosphere for a long time. The idea that wind farms would cause warming is absurd, since wind farms could displace Co2 consumption they would reduce it by reducing Co2 emissions. The effect of reducing or eliminating CO2 would have a far greater positive impact than any negative of wind. The effet of Co2 is permenant and irreversible. A Wind farm can be turned on and off at will.
Another reason for these renewables is they are renewable, climate change is happening but the fact tht solar and wind are renewable alone makes them better choices than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels will be depleted, first hitting peak and then decling, hence peak oil. THAT is an absolute, gauranteed physical certainty. It is hard to precisely estimate how much longer fossil fuels will last but they WILL run out. And sooner than later. Since data on how much is in the ground is imprecise there is uncertaintly in the precise amount but we have a general idea. Its like you have an hourglass and you can see that the top half of the hourglass is a certain size, but you dont know how far it is filled with sand, because the top half is opaque, but you can see how much has poured into the bottom half and how long it has been pouring in there, thus a rate of depletion,, you know that there is a finite amount of sand in the top half and that it is emptying out, and you can see by the rate it is emptying that the sand will be depleted not too far from now, even though you do not know exactly when, you know it will happen and it is not that far away. The "cornucopians" who think thje earth has an unlimited amount of fossil fuels and that basically we can do anything, that the laws of nature dont matter, that we can if we want generate infinite amounts of fossil fuel energy, basic physics be damned, well, they are basically saying that since we cannot see the amount of sand in the top half of the hourglass that since we cannot make a precise measurement that therefore we might as well just assume the amount of sand is infinite. This is despite thje fact that the top half of the hourglass is of a finite size, the sand is pouring out quickly and already a lot has poured out.
Basically the cornucopias, they are living in a fantasy world, insisting the top half of the hourglass contains an infinite amount of sand, are in denial about the dire state of affairs and the fact we are headed towards practical depletion of fossil fuels.
Assuming you're not a troll, I can assure you that here in South-Western England the three trees we have had come down over the years have all been blown down at night. And I've been in some pretty strong winds at night in New England, the Mid-West and the Gulf of Mexico. So where are these "every place I've ever lived"?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
energy extraction
extract from what ? and where does this energy go ? it does not magically disappear. first law of thermodynamics
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
What are the numbers for a parking lot outside of Walmart? A small local change is not an unreasonable tradeoff for clean power.
That makes two things entropy has in common with my ex. (The first: both are always increasing)
I suggest the use of silver bullets and burning the remains.
Alternatively, get him into a desert somewhere and then nuke the whole thing from orbit.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... Oil and Coal, since there is NO way that can hurt the climate.
Be seeing you...
We are nowhere near using enough wind power for it to become a problem and if we covered everything in those towers over then next 100 years... they lose MOST the wind energy for the tiny surface area the blades cover. This is a complete waste, getting undue attention by the idiotic media.
How about the controversy of people selfishly and irresponsibly popping out babies? Nobody wants to bring up the TRUE and controversial issue of the population crisis and how it is causing all these problems, from climate change to endangered animals to resource cost increases. We don't even discuss population even being a problem or how we are contributing to the problem and then never even begin to address possible solutions to that problem.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Stupid sentence, absolutely meaningless and inflammatory.
ANY changes "if spatially large enough" *might*... have noticeable impacts on [local] to [regional] [weather] and [climate]....
If I build a single windmill 1000km high, I bet it might have some noticeable impacts on a whole host of things, likewise if I build 10,000,000 windmills all within close proximity of each other, it will likely have a bunch of different noticeable impacts on "stuff"...
Anyway, a stupid headline, to a stupid summary, to likely a stupid story, which I'm not going to bother to read.
Any large scape project impact on a large scale.
There is no free energy. If you are stealing energy from the weather system, the weather system will change and become a weather system with less energy. If you try to steal energy from the ocean waves, the ocean ecologies will be affected.
When you farm, you are mining material from the soil, we put back through petro cemicals som of what is taken, but the other solid matter is just gone. Nothing is free, your just mining the soil.
Burning up petroleum to run cars around is just burning up a finite resource that we have almost taken half of the existing stocks from the ground.
We don't have much in the way of long term planning around a sustainable earth, either looking at energy resources, food resources or population size. Throw in a good dose of man aided global warming and things could change rather rapidly and within our lifetime, and not for the better.
The Capitalist system with its sole purpose to make a profit may be the single most destructive force on the planet. It has no breaks on externalized cost or collarteral damage, just the profits that can be had today, let someone else clean up my mess tommorrow.
The very places that are ideal to place wind farms tend to be places that birds like to use for traveling long distances. As long as the major bird "traffic lanes" are mapped out before choosing sites to place wind farms, the number of birds killed can be reduced. Put them in the wrong place, though, and you could end up killing an awful lot of them.
I also have nightmares about the valley of the living windmills.
how could you not reference this?
http://xkcd.com/556/
(disclaimer: you probably WERE, but dont be a joke snob; share with the whole class :)
Solar energy capture reduces ground heating.
Not necessarily.
Solar cells use only a fraction of the incoming energy. If you replace a light colored surface with a dark solar cell, the "waste" energy of the solar cell could be equal or higher than the amount of energy originally captured.
"This post has been brought to you by the clean coal coalition"
The question is whether it ACTUALLY does...
The problem with climate models is that they're basically extended MadLibs at this point. We have knowns and lots of blanks that you can fill in with whatever you want. The final story varies wildly and can often be whatever you want.
Charge one variable and then another and you can get whatever output you want. Want run away global warming with sixty meter rises in ocean level? Some "scientists" have predicted that. What a new global ice age with the world covered in continent spanning iceflows? We can do that too.
And everything in between. Want global warming AND increased storm activity? We can do that even though that should be fairly tricky by warming the equator and not warming the poles (thus increasing the temperature differentials and thus the intensity of the storms.).
Climate science needs a lot more study. As it stands, it's not nearly developed enough to make theories. They just don't know enough. Given time, they'll have enough data and have worked out the problems in current analysis.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I could be very wrong here, but would the conservation of energy, and the fact that eventually all the used energy eventually ends up as heat energy, mean that the only thing these wind mills could do is move heat from the area of the wind farm to the city or where ever the power is used? Perhaps there could be local changes between night and day but those would have to seem to cancel out beyond the transfer to the city. And the city (plus the heat in the electrical lines) would warm up by the exact amount of cooling at the wind farm?
Well, that's a kick in the head for the AGW crowd...
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Conservation of energy- suck up wind power or tidal power and something will change. But I'm thinking that the wind/tidal farms would have to be huge to make an global difference.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
That this is another study funded by the oil or coal or nuclear industry . . .
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
So, now its also wind farms, plus dairy farms , plus beef Cattle farms, and fish farms, and Haarp farms.. Mr, Farm, you been a naughty plot of acreage! I'm so glad it's not volcanos or sunspots, or magnetic anomalies, or exhaust gases.. it's all the farms' fault...
As far as I know, this was first studied and published about 10 years ago by a group led by Dr. David Keith. This isn't news. No power is "free", everything action has a reaction. Anyway, whatever.
Climate change is shorthand for " the global, very very long term -multiple centuries long - changing of the atmospheric conditions which give rise to climate and especially temperature "
From the paper :
the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the airâ(TM)s heat near the surface, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases.â
I don't think I need to elaborate anymore for this group of readers to understand what the difference is. Nor do I need to elaborate on which news outlets malignantly misrepresented this paper's findings and what those news outlets motivations were.
This is a little case study of what the deniers in the media have systematically done to the the science of climate change and to public opinion of climate change.
Unless you're talking about QM or Post Modernism, there are not many realities, there is one. That reality includes the certainty of catastrophic, civilization-ending climate change if we continue on our present course.
Such climate change is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States of America.
The individuals who have elected to lie to the American public regarding the reality and cause of climate change represent the same national security threat and form a distinct class of criminal that society has every right to pursue, prosecute and punish.
You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater.
You cannot yell "no fire" in a burning theater.
You cannot conspire to conceal the reality of an impending iceberg because you are a first class passenger profiting from delay and you know you can bribe your way onto a lifeboat leaving others to die.
Misrepresenting this paper's conclusions is a criminal, generationicidal act.
Slashdot should not aide and abet mass murder.