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In my windiest dreams

In my windiest dreams

and with all the mockery I have heaped on Obama and windmills, I could not have dreamed up this headline and story, Wind farms may have warming effect – research:

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.

Prior entries in the Tilting at Windmill Series:

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Comments

Well this suggests that windfarms behave like mountain ranges. Soo leeward desert and windward rain. Is there a measurable change in rainfall patterns around these farms?

If I were a farmer.. having one of these things in my field would increase my rain and provide fertilizer by dicing opportunistic crows.

Now… gotta find some land windward of some liberal’s ‘estate’ to spoil his view and kill his lawn.

Rolling eyes 😉

Every time we turn around the news gets worse and worse for the warmists, but yet they persist in their lunacy.

LukeHandCool | April 30, 2012 at 3:24 pm

But surely all the millions of flatulance farting feathered fowl killed by these wind farms would otherwise be dooming us immediately with their methane-induced sh*t-spewin’ grins.

Save the world … eat all the birds and cattle you can get your hands on.

LukeHandCool (who always wanted a pet toucan).

Cowboy Curtis | April 30, 2012 at 3:25 pm

We had to warm the village……I mean planet, in order to cool it.

    LukeHandCool in reply to LukeHandCool. | April 30, 2012 at 3:38 pm

    And how much do you wanna bet that they are grazing on beans, the magical fruit?

    dmacleo in reply to LukeHandCool. | April 30, 2012 at 3:40 pm

    HEY..
    you leave those cows alone.
    their farts spin those blades to prive power that is then used solely by the windmills to rotate.

    quiz: who here knows that when they are not generating power windmills suck power to keep electronics working?
    god awful waste of good cow farts really.

Not a totally knowledgeable question here, but wouldn’t the (mostly Chinese-manufactured) generators in the wind tower nacelles be giving off a fair amount of heat as they’re busily pumping out all of that “green” energy? Might that account for some fraction of the increased ambient temperature observed?

Oops!

0. The work is available here. “Considering the complexity of the issue, our results should be interpreted as illustrative rather than definitive.”

1. My uninformed opinion is that the complexity of climate is exceeds our current understanding to a level which rules out confident predictions. Various scenarios are plausible enough that the climate deserves a high research priority.

2. The reported results are consistent with my prejudice, which makes me doubly wary. Note to self: calm down.

3. First thing is for the analysis to be independently checked.

4. Then we need to understand the heat flow at the engineering-model level. Then on to the underlying science.

5. The exciting thing is that, if the analysis is confirmed, laboratory analogs of the process could be constructed and the various drivers tuned so that the models could be experimentally validated.

6. Hopefully this episode will illustrate how much we have yet to learn—how much we had better learn—about climate. Nature’s climatological indifference to civilization will not remain benign forever.

Simple fact of the matter is that you cannot take energy out of a system without altering the system. if you draw energy from the wind, you are removing energy from the airflow and that will have an effect on weather patterns to some unknown degree. Same with Hydro power. You remove energy from the river which will have an effect both upstream and downstream.

    Browndog in reply to Rorschach. | April 30, 2012 at 4:44 pm

    Indeed.

    Milhouse in reply to Rorschach. | May 1, 2012 at 1:21 am

    Yes, that is obvious, but this effect seems to be different; it’s not about the energy that is being extracted from the wind (which you’d think would cool things down) but the mixing of different layers.

    About that, though, there was an editorial in Analog years ago proposing that America build giant wind farms in West Africa, to suck the energy out of the winds that blow out into the Atlantic, and thus reduce the number and strength of hurricanes. The electricity generated would be a side benefit, which we could generously donate to the Africans, thus making them happy about building the things.

Obama Twirly Turbines ForwarD Globull Warming Tipping Point

    Obama and Gore will soon order Americans to wear those little beanie caps with propellers on top to stop the warming effect of these giant “Martians”.

Insufficient, unreliable, incredibly expensive, subsidized output on immense quantities of land that is unavailable to anyone else for any other use and exempt from every environmental regulation on the books, requiring back-up by unsubsidized, existing infrastructure and capacity that the government is busying itself shutting down and from which they are choking off fuel supplies. Made in China. What could possibly go wrong? Who knew? Thank goodness the State University of New York at Albany is on the job.

I wonder what wind popcorn tastes like?

Midwest Rhino | April 30, 2012 at 5:57 pm

The key phrase, as with AGP … “But the researchers said more studies were needed, at different locations and for longer periods, before any firm conclusions could be drawn.”

NEED MORE MONEY … no doubt the best place to study will be in Hawaii or CA … or some perfect Caribbean island. And they’ll lower costs by using lots of young female coeds … and they’ll invite congressmen that sign on to join them in wild parties a review of the studies every year.

    Midwest Rhino in reply to Midwest Rhino. | April 30, 2012 at 5:59 pm

    … oh, and a guy on FOX said oil companies get some big fine for each bird killed, but wind farms are exempt.

      dmacleo in reply to Midwest Rhino. | April 30, 2012 at 8:48 pm

      even if they see a dead bird, no idea how it died, and self report it they get slammed.
      windmills though…get to slice them all day long…

It has always been my view that one should see, and feel the real world…

The world we live in…

Here’s 30 seconds of the “real” world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwVz5hdAMGU

[…] application of global-warming prevention policies are toxic, both Professor Jacobson and I find the irony highly entertaining. Based on a scientific analysis of the data, I predict that Obama’s “Green Energy […]

Mixing the layers of air. Knocking birds out of the sky. What will they fail to predict next?

Fluffy Foo Foo | April 30, 2012 at 8:35 pm

But Portlandia will be cooler. Screw middle of the nowhere Texas and their climate change!

You people are a riot. These are among the funniest comments that I have ever heard. Leno’s writers should be reading these posts.