New source of climate warming: Wind farms

[bijou]

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.  ...

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/04/30/new-source-of-climate-warming-wind-farms/

[JohnnyReb]

So, wind turbines have caused all the recent tornadoes, huh?

I thought those giant propellers were to speed up the earths rotation so we would have more nights in a year and therefore less sunshine and global warming...

[Lacarnut]

Windmills, solar and ethanol are a couple of screwball ideas the dunces in DC dreamed up. Billions of dollars pissed down the drain.