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To: aquila48
What the turbines take out of the air is kinetic energy - they slow it down, probably introduce a little more entropy and turbulence into it.

So if you think about it, under normal conditions the atmosphere probably cools more rapidly than the land underneath it - radiative cooling off into space. So a wind blowing across the land would be cooler than the ground, and thus extract heat from the ground.

Now we have huge turbine farms. They are extracting kinetic energy, slowing the airflow down. This means less air mass per unit time blowing over the ground, less energy transfer. The ground retains more of its daytime heat.

Well, that's a working theory anyway. Could probably be tested fairly easily with anemometers and thermometers.

14 posted on 04/30/2012 8:11:06 PM PDT by ThunderSleeps (Stop obama now! Stop the hussein - insane agenda!)
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To: ThunderSleeps

I agree there may be some local increase in temperature, but the kinetic energy that the wind lost in the turbines would have eventually been lost downstream, thus decreasing the temperature somewhere downstream.

My point is that there is no net energy input into the earth as a whole due to the wind farms, therefore no “global” warming or cooling as a result.


16 posted on 04/30/2012 8:27:27 PM PDT by aquila48
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