Posted on 04/30/2012 8:43:55 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Great news for NIMBY activists that want public policy to follow the anthropogenic global-warming agenda but don’t want their vistas cluttered. The wind farms that they support everywhere else but nearby themselves may be part of the problem, according to Reuters:
Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power. …
Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.
The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.
“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.
“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.
Wind power is already one of the worst options in the renewables market. Wind is unreliable, and the unreliability of energy production causes numerous problems for distribution. The manufacture and maintenance of the windmills requires a lot of energy, costs a lot of money, and creates a lot of waste, although perhaps not as much as Solyndra left behind. The blades kill hundreds of thousands of birds a year already, and any expansion will make that destruction much worse.
Of course, the rise in temperature might be beneficial. No one has shown that even if a warming period occurs naturally or artificially that the overall impact will be relentlessly negative. At one time, most of Greenland was used for farming and habitation, a period that lasted a few centuries until global cooling eventually covered most of it in ice. However, if the wind-farm advocates argue that warming is good for the environment, it negates the stated need to build expensive and inefficient wind farms in the first place.
This research, if confirmed in later studies, will demonstrate the folly of massive public investments for solutions ahead of sufficient testing, even when the problem has been firmly established. By definition, solutions mean solving the problem, not adding to it. While wind farms in deserts might make some sense, where birds and farmland won’t get impacted, building wind farms on otherwise arable land for the purpose of reducing the temperature of the climate and improving the natural environment makes no sense at all.
bfl
Ping.
“Wind power is already one of the worst options in the renewables market. Wind is unreliable, and the unreliability of energy production causes numerous problems for distribution.”
Not to mention how terrible they look at night. Lighting up the night sky like a Christmas tree with a non stop coordinatied blinking.
Of course. It reduces the circulation of air. How can it not cause greater disparities in temperature?
Not to mention all of the birds these things kill.
Safe the Ert, Live in a Cave or kill yourself.....
This is the anti-progress mantra of the “progressives”
Politics trumps the laws of physics ping!
Under GWB my Republican neighbors used to preach to me about the benefits of windmills. Not knowing anything allowed them to imagine an untapped source of unlimited free energy for us that would make all our lives better. Who wouldnt want that ? Look how ethanol worked out. I noticed there were no windmills on his property.
He is less trusting with Obama as POTUS, fortunately.
A sucker is born every minute and then he votes.
I’ve actually had enviro-wackos tell me what a beautiful sight that is.
Sigh...
lets see...white paint reflects heat...
did they put the thermometer in the turbine housing next to the electrical motor?
Global warming doofs should be forced to wear propeller beanie hats.
Trump is mighty pissed that Scotland is building Wind turbines within seeing range of his new gold course. I think he’s entirely correct, they wanted him to build it and now they’re ruining the view. But’s still it’s funny to see him get screwed over by the slimy Scottish separatist leader who was once his buddy.
Bzzzt! wrong. During any time when people where there it was ice covered. There was just a time during the medieval warm period when the coasts were a little more hospitable than now and some cattle and a few crops could be raised, but it was never a temperate region in human history.
Reminds me of the reporter taking a guided tour in the USSR commenting on how the Communist guide extolling the beauty of the gray, dirty block apartment buildings. They were beautiful to him because of what they represented (the State providing housing to the People), not because of any innate beauty in them.
Beauty is, it seems, in the eye (and mind) of the beholder.
I used to work for the company that owns most of the windmills at the wind farm in the Palm Springs area. It was owned by the Dutch Government. Our tax dollars to support them. They ruin the view and don’t produce enough energy to make them really worthwile. It is a total scam.
I HATE wind farms. A herd of cows, a exaltation of larks, a pride of lions...mine for windmills is...
A BLIGHT of Windmills.
I'm waiting for the first "journalist" to point out that the warming will then be 7.2 °C over the next century - and a whopping 72 °C over the next millenium! (Luckily "journalists" have trouble with math, so multiplication by 10 is too difficult for them.)
Yep those stupid things ruin an otherwise nice photo.
Wind power is very successful....
at accomplishing its primary goal in the minds of its proponents...
making them feel good about themselves...
Lobs oppose all forms of energy.
Sen Feinstein sued to stop solar farms in order to protect a turtle.
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