Wide-Scale US Wind Power Could Cause Significant Warming, Study Says (technologyreview.com)

XxtraLarGe shares a report: Wind power is booming in the United States. It's expanded 35-fold since 2000 and now provides 8% of the nation's electricity. The US Department of Energy expects wind turbine capacity to more than quadruple again by 2050. But a new study by a pair of Harvard researchers finds that a high amount of wind power could mean more climate warming, at least regionally and in the immediate decades ahead. The paper raises serious questions about just how much the United States or other nations should look to wind power to clean up electricity systems. The study, published in the journal Joule, found that if wind power supplied all US electricity demands, it would warm the surface of the continental United States by 0.24 C. That could significantly exceed the reduction in US warming achieved by decarbonizing the nation's electricity sector this century, which would be around 0.1 C. "If your perspective is the next 10 years, wind power actually has -- in some respects -- more climate impact than coal or gas," coauthor David Keith, a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard, said in a statement. "If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power is enormously cleaner than coal or gas."

Comments

Re:This is complete bullshit

[Layzej]

Windpower does not add heat to the atmosphere of Earth, it just mixes around where it's hot and where it's cold. Greenhouse gases add heat energy (and thus average temperature) to the Earth's global atmosphere. These are completely different things.

Add to that the fact that CO2 is warming the globe by about 0.2C/decade. That dwarfs the localized warming after only a few decades. - even if we converted all US energy production to wind.

Re:You not liking this doesn't make it FUD

[mark-t]

He didn't say it was, he said that conflating the adding of heat to the atmosphere with changing where it happens to get warmer is pro-fossil-fuel FUD.

The paper doesn't conflate them, explicitly acknowledging that the observed temperature change is regional, but the summary of the underlying message it delivers, which is that it causes significant warming, most definitely strongly appears to.

Re:What about other options

[Weirsbaski]

Fukushima, Chernobyl, Mayak, Three Mile Island, Lucens, Sellafield, Ibaraki, Jaslovské Bohunice, Idaho Falls all INES level 4 or higher. You can argue in favour of nuclear till you are blue in the face but, fair or not, given the long history of nuclear safety issues the public is about as interested in living within 500 kilometres of a nuclear plant as it is in eating as vanilla ice cream with ketchup and onions.

And yet coal-ash disasters can destroy tons of square miles, pollute rivers for hundreds of miles, and cost over a $billion to clean up, and nobody says a word. The coal industry better thank $diety that "nuclear" is a now a curse-word...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://appvoices.org/coalash/d...
(and more I'm too lazy to look up)