By Robert Bradley Jr. — January 16, 2024
“Our results from a large sample of wind farms revealed significant local warming effects at night, insignificant impacts during the daytime, and the mostly negative impacts on vegetation.” (Yingzuo Qin et al., Environmental Research Letters, 2022)
Deep Ecology is a philosophy that puts nature on an equal footing with humankind. It speaks in religious tones to its broad congregation of partial and total believers. “The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness for that communion with the world that can lift our spirits and fill our senses with the richness and immediacy of life itself,” Al Gore stated in Earth in the Balance (1992), calling for “bold and unequivocal” global action where “the rescue of the environment” is “the central organizing principle for civilization.”
Applied to the Church of Climate, the often unstated assumptions are:
- The human influence on climate is pronounced and controlling
- That influence cannot be positive or benign, only problematic-catastrophic
- Global governance can and must solve this problem
To members of this philosophy-religion, the planet “has been delivered in perfect working condition and cannot be exchanged for a new one.” (Natural Capitalism, by Amory Lovins et al., 2013.) An issue of World Watch magazine, “Playing God with Climate” (Volume 10, no. 6; Nov-Dec 1997), scolded man for interfering with the Earth’s default condition.
Hard Being Green
It is hard being green! Imagine all the look-the-other-way insults to the living space that come with the shotgun wedding to industrial wind turbines, in particular. I was reminded of this upon encountering an article called “Impacts of 319 Wind Farms on Surface Temperature and Vegetation in the United States,” (Yingzuo Qin et al., Environmental Research Letters, February 11, 2022)
The abstract follows, with the politically correct first sentence (maybe a reviewer recommended this) to demote the bad news. We report–you decide.
Abstract
The development of wind energy is essential for decarbonizing energy production. However, the construction of wind farms changes land surface temperature (LST) and vegetation by modifying land surface properties and disturbing land–atmosphere interactions. In this study, we used moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer satellite data to quantify the impacts on local climate and vegetation of 319 wind farms in the United States.
Our results indicated insignificant impacts on LST during the daytime but significant warming of 0.10 °C of annual mean nighttime LST averaged over all wind farms, and 0.36 °C for those 61% wind farms with warming. The nighttime LST impacts exhibited seasonal variations, with stronger warming in winter and autumn, up to 0.18 °C, but weaker effects in summer and spring. We observed a decrease in peak normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for 59% of wind farms due to infrastructure construction, with an average reduction of 0.0067 compared to non-wind farm areas.
The impacts of wind farms depended on wind farm size, with winter LST impacts for large and small wind farms ranging from 0.21 °C to 0.14 °C, and peak NDVI impacts ranging from −0.009 to −0.006. The LST impacts declined with the increasing distance from the wind farm, with detectable impacts up to 10 km. In contrast, the vegetation impacts on NDVI were only evident within the wind farm locations. Wind farms built in grassland and cropland showed larger warming effects but weaker vegetation impact than those built on forests.
Furthermore, spatial correlation analyses with environmental factors suggest limited geographical controls on the heterogeneous wind farm impacts and highlight the important role of local factors. Our analyses based on a large sample offer new evidence for wind farm impacts with improved representativeness compared to previous studies.
This knowledge is important to fully understand the climatic and environmental implications of energy system decarbonization.
Conclusion
Based on satellite remote sensing data, our assessment of 319 wind farms in the United States provides new observational evidence for the impacts of wind farms on local climate and vegetation. Our study reconciles the inconsistent impacts reported in previous studies, which focused only on a few individual wind farms lacking representativeness.
Our results from a large sample of wind farms revealed significant local warming effects at night, insignificant impacts during the daytime, and the mostly negative impacts on vegetation. The large heterogeneity in wind farm impacts highlights the role of wind farm characteristics, environmental factors, and undocumented local factors.
The quantification method can be applied to other countries or regions with available wind farm information. Further studies using satellite data at finer resolution than MODIS data could reveal the impact with more spatial detail. These observations can be combined with numerical simulations to advance the mechanistic understanding of wind farm impacts on the local climate.
The improved knowledge of wind farm impacts helps inform the environmental consequences of wind energy development and guide clean energy planning for sustainable development.
New hypothesis: the warming of the past couple of decades is due to the adoption of wind turbines and solar panels.
What other explanation could there be?
Further studies combined with numerical simulations.
Just send money and off we go!
Don’t worry we’ll let you know if we find anything.
Anything at all.
More unintended consequences or more palaver?
“To members of this philosophy-religion, the planet “has been delivered in perfect working condition and cannot be exchanged for a new one.””
Wow, that’s nuts.
Sounds more like creationism or intelligent design
The authors conclude “The improved knowledge of wind farm impacts helps inform the environmental consequences of wind energy development and guide clean energy planning for sustainable development.”
Based on their findings I conclude the solar sponsors were very generous.
No such thing as a free lunch (energy). You can’t just extract energy from the environment without changing the environment in unintended ways.
dear gods where do you start to unravel such garbage, trash, magical thing, exaggeration, trivia and other assorted junk
even before they used a NASA Sputnik as the source for their data
They claim ‘significant‘ yet at very best can only dig 0.1°C out of the data, ramping that up to 0.2°C right up close to a select few windmills
From a Sputnik that can only ever get to within plus/minus 2 Celsius using an imaginary Emissivity figure and calibrated against balloons or buoys, whichever give the better/expected result.
They get into a brief & muddled discussion of atmospheric boundary layer, (ABL) what it is and how the windmills upset it at night
There are libraries full of books on ABL and I get the impression nobody yet has a clue – it’s right up there with dancing angels and often relies on Greengasgases to make it work.
BUT, the ABL forms at night during settled weather conditions, esp = when there is No Wind
Soooo, how do the windmills manage to upset the ABL so as to mix warm air from aloft with cooler air at the surface, when there is no wind blowing?
My explanation;
At night, air cools much quicker than the near surface = right down and dirty in among the plants. In the windfarm those would be grasses, probably quite overgrown
What the grasses do is create a t=real actual blanket over the ground.
The soil under the grasses will be vastly warmer at night than the air above the grasses and if the grasses are not disturbed, will try to keep it that way
Hence how the windmills do actually seem to warm the air at night (when the wind is blowing sufficient for them to turn)
Yes they create turbulence and what that does is effectively yank the duvet/sheets/blankets off the soil/ground beneath them and let the warm air the grasses were trapping escape.
It’s that simple
Even more complicated is that at night, the grasses will be absorbing water vapour from the air and condensing it. Thus they will be warming themselves from the latent heat so released.
(Trees are the real masters of that. I have data, We are talking 2°C difference from day to night)
I have data and I have pictures and have (previously) shown it all to you here.
We really do not want to be doing that – warming the air at night is yet another mechanism by which a warming atmosphere represents a cooling Earth (and small ‘e’ earth in this case)
Of serious consideration is that the turbulence is ‘giving’ the grasses on the ground even more water vapour, they then condense it and that raises the temp by a little bit more.
(and you thought you understood ‘drought’)
Unfortunately this blows another hole in their story as that would be of real benefit to the plants/grasses, not a deprecation as they so want to paint.
(I’m not defending windmills, not least and as explained, they are sucking heat out of Planet Earth)
magical thing = laugh-a-minute me. oh dear
I iz tickled but, was supposed to say magical thinking (self brainwashing)
ha, as if schools (as we just read), governments and media don’t do enough of that already
Out beyond Royston, Hertfordshire, in fruit growing fields, there have been for many years a series of “windmills”. They look like small wind generators but are, though, electrically powered and their job is, on cold winter nights, to keep the air moving and prevent frost forming. Could this be similar phenomenon to the effect noted where temps. are higher in the vicinity of wind-farms?
“BUT, the ABL forms at night during settled weather conditions, esp = when there is No Wind
Soooo, how do the windmills manage to upset the ABL so as to mix warm air from aloft with cooler air at the surface, when there is no wind blowing?”
It is well known that the tower of a turbine produces a “chop-chop” in the downstream air flow. As each blade passes the tower there is a decrease in velocity past the tower compared with the open air above.
++++++
The effect of this at ground level is that what may have been a generally (or perfectly) smooth breeze is turned into a rattling series of gusts, all the time. A number of effects arise from this cause. One is a higher turnover of air trapped on the ground by the blanket of grasses because of “puffing”. Another is sound bothering people and animals. And another is the warming of air just above the ground due to induced vertical air exchange. The trees protect the ground from the first disturbance, which shows in the measurements. The second is not relevant to the point. The last is the source of the increased heat loss from the ground, detected as warming by the satellite. Puffing at the ground brings warmer air up that is otherwise hidden from the IR sensors by the topmost grass.
As to the objection about instrument accuracy, this is not applicable in this particular case. This is a good example of the difference between precision and accuracy. Spatial IR can be detected with great precision, even if the actual temperature is incorrect. The search for difference can be done one night at a time comparing the readings in a wind project area and out. The readings at the time are what matters, not how accurate any pair of readings is in absolute terms. It is a study of precisely measured differences, not absolute temperatures. It is a cunning stunt.
The GMST is quite inaccurate, so pundits prefer to advertise anomalies which are in fact not measurable at once, so that doesn’t work for the experiment as claimed because we have not time travel yet. An anomaly is valid only if you measure everything at once, or very accurately. We all know that neither are true for GMST.
In this case, taking the IR readings with a modern instrument at the same time in two different places, provides a precise anomaly that is valid even if the temperatures’ accuracy is suspect.
It is a good experiment.
The tower causes problems. We’ll just pass a law that requires all new wind turbines built after, say, 2030 to be towerless. How? Not my problem. The engineers will surely come up with something.</sarcasm>
don:
That is a greta idea (the perfect misspelling in this case) and will be enthusiastically taken up by the IEA.
Never mind the possible impact of the 0.10 deg C night-time warming, how about the birds, bats and bugs? The term “impact” has some real meaning for them.
Oh come on man…
… you know that dead birds, bats, and bugs are irrelevant when you have a planet to save. !
Not to mention that about 4 million more people die every year from cold temperatures than hot temperatures.
The blood vessels constrict when it is cooler to conserve heat causing blood pressure to rise increasing the number of strokes and heart attacks in the cooler months.
Don’t know if the science is the same. Fruit orchards and citrus groves have used wind machines for decades when frost threatens. Mixes the higher warm air layer with the colder at/near ground air layer. May raise the lower temperature enough to save the crops.
Former Greens candidate now warns wind turbines are lunacy and a scam
After all these years, finally, signs that more Greens are waking up to the awful truthSteve Nowakowski was a Greens candidate in Cairns in 2006. He was a co-founder of Rainforest Reserves Australia, and was hired as a photographer, but he didn’t like what he saw. Two years ago he was concerned at the environmental damage of the Emerald Wind farm, now he’s filming the destruction in the hope of stopping wind farms being built in Queensland. He’s calling it lunacy, and arguing we need nuclear power.
In a big leap, he even realizes the green groups are “colluding” with the government and the money making environmental vandals in the greatest land grab of the age. Mark my words, eventually this issue will split the Greens.
First Bob Brown former Greens leader, and now footsoldiers like Nowakowski and a few other conservationists are campaigning against wind turbines — word is spreading…
What a waste of time and resources, I want my money back.
When I first started deeper reading of climate change about 1990, my geochemical background had me regarding significany global/regional temperature changes of the order of 5 deg C were needed before they could be taken seriously..
Now we have a paper before us, reporting a change of 0.1 deg C. That is 50 times smaller than what I considered to be worth reporting.
There is little confidence, little progress in reporting that some windfarms might chage local ttemperatures by 0.1 deg C on some nights. The numbers are simply swimming around in a choppy sea of uncertainty, with little confidence able to be attributed to them.
It is number noise.
Noise like this has been a major theme in most global warming studies. There is a gulf of convenience between temperature measurements that are meaningful and those that are but variations on a theme of noise. It is not valid to use mathematical estimates of uncertainty when practical estimates are required. There can be a tenfold difference between them.
Geoff S
My main question, who is paying these clowns??
We are, via tax exempt corps.,ngos, etc.
The rich, who own the media and control the politicians with their campaign contributions, hope to make trillions in profit off of so-called “climate change”.
Wind mills have been used by orange grove farmers for decades to keep their trees warm at night during cold snaps. Those wind mill measure 10s of feet in size. What do you suppose would happen with blades a 300-ft in size? They’re going to draw the relatively warm air at altitude down to the surface. The surface temperatures are going to be lower than the 2-meter temperatures because of radiative cooling from the ground.
Ain’t no chance of that happening, on the cyborg farm near us (7 of 9 only working as usual).
They hardly ever turn. I wonder how much they’re earning? Curiously, the water authority sold the farm off to new owners a few years ago, probably not making enough on subsidies.
Temperature is irrelevant.
It is much more dangerous, the wind farms change wind patterns.
The wind IS our climate, not the temperature.
The wind farms are able to change climate on whole continents like Eurasia