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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."
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.
Attempting to conflate them is pro-fossil-fuel FUD.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
How do these compare to nuclear? Everyone keeps talking about fossil fuels and green renewables, but I have to hunt around for mention of nuclear. What gives?
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.
How do these compare to nuclear?
Nuclear: no carbon pollution at all, its first commercial iteration being several orders of magnitude safer than most (and at least 1 than any) "renewables" (and especially coal or oil), any subsequent iterations being drastically safer than even that. Any opposition against nuclear is 100% political.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Nope, this is coming from fossil fuel corporations who stand to lose $107 TRILLION in investments if we all move to renewables.
It's like they always say, follow the money, and the sunk investments in fossil fuels ECLIPSE any money spent on funding AGW studies
If you read the summary well, they are comparing a 100% wind setup for USA (something that we all know that is not even desirable, we need several power sources) and they agree that the worse case is a "small" 0.24C increase due a little higher mixing of atmospheric layers... comparing that with the current setup is a clear win, as that value is even less what we get if we could stop using coal and other dirty power sources everywhere.
Yes, everything we do can change things, probably big cities make higher temperature increase due to their skyscrapers and AC systems than wind farms and this paper just try to measure this... and agree that is a better solution.
Sadly people do not really read things, just quickly screen the summary and assume what they want... or even worse, dirty energy lobbies abuse the paper to try to spread FUD.
Higuita
If an electrician slips and falls to his death while performing maintenance on a nuclear cooling tower, would you say that fatality was due to nuclear power? Of course not, you'd say that was an industrial accident. Same as if that electrician's brother slips and falls to his death while performing maintenance on a wind turbine.
When a wind farm produces a deadly tornado, or a solar farm turns in an Archimedes death ray, let us know. And no other power source has the chance for such devastation that each of its generators has an evacuation zone for everyone within a ten mile radius.