Misreported US Study on Connection Between Wind Turbines and Global Warming

 

Liming Zhou led a team of researchers at the State University of New York-Albany looking at the effects of wind turbines on global warming.  The report was published on 30 April in the journal Nature Climate Change. Because the report has been misrepresented in some sections of the US and British press, Zhou has had to release a statement condemning the misleading reports and setting the record straight.

The usual anti-wind lobby, both in the UK and in the States jumped onto a part of the report which, in so many words, said that wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface.   “Re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface”??? Surely that’s the same as global warming!! No No and thrice No.

The misleading reports were quickly attacked and the true picture given. The misleading reports had headlines such as “How the windfarms increase climate change”.  But as can be seen from the responses, the truth was outed.

The National Resources Defence Council’s Switchboard Blog entitled  ‘Do Wind Power Really Cause Climate Change?’: said:

A number of news outlets have picked up a recent paper that looks at the local land surface temperature impacts of large wind farms. This has resulted in a number of headlines like “Wind farms can cause climate change”.

This wording is deeply misleading in this context and conflates small-scale, local impacts on nighttime land surface temperatures and global climate disruption. Using the same language to describe these two very different phenomena blatantly ignores the profound differences in magnitude, scope and severity that separate them. It’s like equating a bumblebee with Mothra.

If you read the text of these stories, you’ll discover that the paper’s findings don’t match the gravity implied by their silly headlines. For example, the telegraph story linked above says that “[the temperature changes are] much smaller than the estimated change caused by other factors such as man made global warming.”

Nicely put. And just in case you are in any doubt as to the analogy, here’s a Bumblebee:

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And here’s Mothra!:

mothra1 Misreported US Study on Connection Between Wind Turbines and Global Warming

The research supports earlier research which found that wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO2 and air pollutants.

Professor Sherwood from Cornell University is quoted as saying “the wind farms generate gentle turbulence near the ground that causes these to mix together, thus the ground doesn’t get quite as cool. This same strategy is commonly used by fruit growers (who fly helicopters over the orchards rather than windmills) to combat early morning frosts.”

This actually means that wind farms could actually extend growing seasons by reducing morning frost events. That would be a great ancillary benefit of siting turbine arrays on agricultural land and a welcome alternative to flying helicopters (and putting more carbon in the air) to accomplish the same end. It also gives you a sense of the scope and magnitude of this effect.

So predictably and disappointingly, certain sections of the US press have grabbed and twisted good news into bad, but we should be heartened by the swift and effective reaction to set the record straight.

The authoritative American Wind Energy Association (AWEA)’s  CEO Denise Bode yesterday released the following statement:

“This study says nothing about wind energy and global climate and casts no doubt on all the other studies that find wind power is one of the best ways to address climate change. The study merely examined the effect of local air mixing at the site of a wind farm, which has nothing to do with climate because no heat or heat-trapping gases are being added to the atmosphere.

“All scientific studies including this one have found that any impact wind farms may have on local temperature readings is trivially small and localized only to an area immediately around a wind farm project.

“We caution against people with an agenda who may try to misconstrue this study for their own purposes.”

AWEA’s Michael Goggin offered a more detailed “fact check” . Key points are:

Wind power plants do not contribute to climate change and in fact they are one of the leading technologies preventing climate change by avoiding fossil fuel use and the emission of greenhouse gases. Much of the popular reporting on this topic has confused the issue of climate change, which is a major global phenomenon driven by greenhouse gases actually warming the earth by altering the earth’s energy balance and a speculative, small, short-lived, localized impact on the weather that could possibly be caused by wind power plants slightlyaltering how air mixes around wind power plants. It is important to emphasize that wind power cannot contribute to climate change because any localized change in how air mixes is not a forcing of the climate or a change in the Earth’s energy balance. In contrast, greenhouse gases that are emitted into the atmosphere by producing and burning fossil fuels stay in the atmosphere and continue warming the planet every day in perpetuity.

All studies have found that any impact wind power plants may have on local weather is trivially small. A primary conclusion of the study that has generated the recent press articles was that wind power plants can cause a slight increase in nighttime temperatures and a slight decrease in daytime temperatures. All studies have found that any localized impact on the weather would be trivially small, less than a degree Celsius and localized only to an area immediately around a wind farm project. It is also important to point out that nearly all human activities can have an impact on localized weather phenomena and the impacts of farming, building buildings, flying airplanes and reforestation or deforestation are typically much larger than any localized impact found in this study.

littlejohn1 Misreported US Study on Connection Between Wind Turbines and Global Warming

Sadly the British press was not immune to getting it totally wrong- whether by ignorance or malice, I’m not sure-  In an opinion piece for the Daily Mail  columnist Richard Littlejohn of “You couldn’t Make it Up!” catch-phrase fame, opined:

“[A] new study has shown that in areas where windmills operate, average temperatures have risen by one degree Centigrade. So not only are they inefficient and ugly, they actually contribute to global warming. You couldn’t make it up.”

The “opinion piece” of course allows a so-called journalist to avoid the news and facts altogether and ramble on about their pet hobbyhorses ad nauseum. They should always come with a large banner health warning: “May contain numerous errors, inaccuracies and downright lies!”

I’ll give the final word to the Christian Science Monitor, who put it nicely:

‘Don’t believe the headlines. Wind farms do not cause global warming.’: “If it were true that the spinning blades of wind turbines increased the overall temperature of the planet, as opposed to simply redistributing thermal energy, we would have to rewrite some basic laws of physics, particularly the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This is an important distinction from the burning of fossil fuels, which produces gas that increases how much of the sun’s energy the Earth retains. In this respect, this process contributes to a globally warming climate because the source of energy (the sun) is apart from the system that is warmed (the Earth.)”