A pair of studies on wind power published last week are proving irresistible to mainstream reporters and deniers alike because of a seemingly counterintuitive conclusions: widespread use of wind power will cause warming.
But--and this will surely come as a shock--this isn’t really all that true.
Despite the headlines reflecting one of the press releases which claimed that “US wind power would cause warming,” the obvious fact is wind power doesn’t cause climate change. What it might do, according to the study, is mix up the air around the turbine and cause some localized warming as the turbines pull warmer air down.
Now, the study in question makes a ton of unrealistic assumptions, namely by modeling the impacts of what it would be like if 100% of US electricity is generated by wind. Considering that no one, anywhere, is calling for 100% wind, this is clearly not a “real-world” sort of modeling exercise.
But deniers, who loathe models when they say fossil fuels cause warming and that’s bad, were all too eager to promote this model-based study and decry the “major drawbacks” of the 100% wind system that literally no one is arguing in favor of.
Even still, greenhouse gasses trap heat, so the more we burn the warmer it gets. The warming from wind discussed here, though, isn’t adding any additional heat to the system. Instead, it’s just moving it around from one place in the sky to another. Sort of like how a fan doesn’t exactly provide as much cooling power as an air conditioner, but it moves the air around in a way that makes it feel cooler. It’s like that, only in reverse. Turbines pull the warm air from higher up down, and push it around, displacing the cooler surface-level air and causing temperatures at ground level to rise.
This really isn’t all that complicated, but apparently is complex enough to lead to a bunch of unhelpful sounding headlines.
Now, sometimes, researchers are caught off guard when deniers distort their papers. In this case though, one of the authors told Business Insider that he had “no doubt that these results will be misconstrued and misinterpreted.”
So what’s the point? Well, as we look to moving off of fossil fuels, we do absolutely need to be aware of what potential pitfalls await in a renewably powered world. Knowing that there might be some additional warming around wind farms, then, is helpful for that long term planning.
And the study also points out that wind’s impact in this respect is 10 times larger than solar, suggesting that if we don’t take the ridiculous 100% wind path which no one thinks we will anyway, then the warming winds probably won’t make much of a difference.
The wind breaking up layers of warmth in the air may not be pleasant, but they’re no reason to keep passing gas off as the best energy source.
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