Will Wind Power Change Earth's Climate? 883
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is currently running an article on a recent wind power study. A group of Canadian and American scientists has modelled the effects of introducing massive amounts of wind farms into North America and have come up with surprising results. While still having only 1/5th the impact of fossil fuels, wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder. Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
Kyoto (Score:0, Insightful)
Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think not.
Newton's laws can't be repealed (Score:4, Insightful)
It shouldn't come as a surprise that any form of energy capture, no matter how you do it is going to take energy out of the environment and that as a result changes the environment. I'm pretty sure if we had massive solar panels all over the place, that'd effect the temperature by taking sunlight that would have heated the ground and diverting it. There's no free source of energy, you've gotta take it from somewhere!
Nucular (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer to energy problems... (Score:1, Insightful)
Or solar cells in space!
Well I have to say I told you so. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes and yes. Of all the alternative power sources wind is just about the least practical for large scale explotation. Use the right system in the right place.
I'm sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
my thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
Their protests that we're destroying the environment is a basis for them to derive power from so that they can demand change to our way of life.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
Well, duh! (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, many people say that 'of course they won't have as big an affect as a big city'. Maybe not. But wind power on a scale large enough to power that same big city, it might. It'd be significant, anyway.
I'm glad there's a study saying it now, but dammit people, duh!
Re:Finally! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Mix and match! (Score:2, Insightful)
Slight correction, you want them pointing at the coal plants so the radioactive, mercury filled smoke goes around your (and my) house. The Nuclear plant in my town is a good neighbor, paying lots of taxes, while being invisible. The coal power plant just a few miles away is a bad neighbor, doesn't pay taxes (not in my town, I presume they pay taxes to their local town), and feed tons of poisons into the air every day.
Nuclear plants may not be perfect, but compared to the alternatives they are.
Nobody's Happy! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe we should just hold our breath and sufficate. That would solve the whole problem...
Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant. The problem is that the nuclear waste is in a big chunk, and must be stored somewhere. My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right? And we'd have solved the waste storage problem... right? I'm sure there's something I'm missing (other than the obvious: that's just insidiously stupid).
Nuclear heat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kyoto (Score:1, Insightful)
The Kyoto protocol is an unfair and unlikely-to-succeed treaty that will cost the US jobs while failing to accomplish exactly what it is written to do. [usatoday.com]
It is well that the US does not sign it. Too much emphasis has been put on this treaty, not surprisingly from those who are effected least from it climatically (China/India/Mexico) and who are encouraging those to sign who it will impact the most (Russia/USA).
What is worse, it is designed with mandatory cuts based on emissions figures from over a decade ago that would make it even harder to comply with (IE- more damaging to industry) and at the same time exempt nations who emit far more greenhouse gasses from their industrial regions per capita.
Jousting at windmills (Score:3, Insightful)
We occupy less than a third of the Earth's surface.
Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up).
A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?
There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate.
Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result? And that's ignoring the Earth's been getting warmer lately. Or has it? I can't keep up.
Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it. It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:2, Insightful)
Buildings do not move at all and therefore do not absorb any of the wind's energy.
*GASP* !! Is this what the american educational system is producing ? *sigh* This nation is completely fucked if this is the truth
This almost makes me feel like suicide, there's no point in this experimental union of 50 states, it has failed completely.
Re:Mix and match! (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to like nukes, but Chernobyl shows just how bad an accident could get.
Replenishable resources? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though, it seems as though if we require extreme amounts of energy to power our world, we will alter the world we extract it from. There is no free lunch (lifted from the article). Perhaps the answer is in being more efficient with the power we use, thereby requiring less. But I hate those damn econo-flush toilets.
Re:my thoughts (Score:2, Insightful)
The article isn't complaining about anything, it's simply pointing out the obvious: that extracting massive amounts of engery from any terrestrial source is going to have some effect on the Earth's ecosystem.
And yes, humanity is causing an impact on the environment. Duh. That's life on Earth.
IANAE, but maybe their protests that we're destroying the environment has more to do with trying to make sure we manage limited resources so that our way of life won't abruptly run off of the proverbial cliff someday. But no, I'm sure they really just doing it to "derive power" because they personally don't like your way of life. That makes much more sense.
Re:my thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course humanity is and will further impact the environment. The big questions are, what impact is acceptable, and where can we make imporovements? These are very subjective questions, and some possible answers are:
Then there's the question of "how much do you care?". Are you willing to sacrifice the automobile? trains? planes? indoor lighting? The answer to these is typically "no", so let's move on. Now we need to decide if any change (like using wind power) is worth it. The question is then, "is the impact from massive windfarms better or worse than the impact from burning fossil fuels? running nuclear reactors? using tidal forces? sacrificing automobiles? etc? doing nothing until we have magic fusion reactors?".
So, there will *surely* be an impact, no matter what course of action is taken. It is rather annoying however, for every possibility to be shot down with "it's bad for the environment" without an acknowledgement that this is an implicit vote for the current situation over the possible alternative.
Re:Nucular (Score:4, Insightful)
Between mining tailings, waste disposal, and the risk of a meltdown or reactor breach, we're talking about a lot more than a few square miles. (Chernobyl affected dairy farms in the U.S., for example.)
Yes, some people are unreasonably scared of nuclear power. Other are unreasonably enamored of it, some Gersbackian techno-fetish of Big Science to Save The World
In Calgary... (Score:3, Insightful)
For those that are saying that they are noisy (they aren't, unless you're up close to them) or unsightly, I'd encourage you to check out a field of wind turbines, if you have one nearby. I'm not sure about the bird kill issue here in Alberta, I'd have to research that, but I've never seen a dead bird near any of the turbines any time I've visited them. They are clean, quiet, amazing structures. Pure geek awe, really...
Re:Why is there an assumption... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about this - we have no freaking idea what the consequences of a rapid climate change will be.
"Oh crap, we killed all the phytoplankton. Now what?" This is heavy stuff.
Blacktop beat them to it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Viscosity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:my thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
I like having electricity to run my computer, a car I can drive across the country in, a hospital with fancy chemicals and plastics. However I believe it is utterly foolish to continue using the sources for these things that we are at the rate that we are and expect that we can maintain our way of life forever. Refusing to change our way of life at all is a sure way to ensure that we lose it entirely.
Re:Nucular (Score:4, Insightful)
- outside security risks such as earth shakes and BIG F*CKN missiles (remember, these sort of threats are taken in to consideration (today) when building a powerplant - it's not you're average shed)
- neglection of maintenance
The big problem nuclear activists (with any sort of clue and who don't resort to FUD campaigns) showcase is how we're dealing with nuclear waste. That is how do you store contaminated material and burnt out fuel (low rate uranium - it decays you know...). Over the years this waste piles up big time and it isn't really responisble to ship it away to a third world country or to dig it down.Today there exists quite a lot of technology to improve this situation, but it still is mostly both expensive and somewhat inefficient.
Re:Nucular (Score:3, Insightful)
This is one way to reduce all these affects, less people in the world. We are locked into the idea the world can support more and more humans, having less of them will mean more resources to go round!
James
Re:No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
The Tokamaks and similar thermal fusion devices (Stellarators, etc) are a dead end concept. If you want one of those, just use the power the Sun generates, at least it is for free. Making your own is anti-economic.
Innertial Confinement Fusion may solve the density issue I suppose, but that won't come cheap either and the fact that it is an inherently pulsed device carries its own problems.
So Fission beats Fusion on nearly all criteria. Even once the Tokamaks start working properly.
Cold Fusion would be nice, but I wouldn't bet anything on it.
The solution to the energy problem must lay on a mix of sources. No single source is good enough.
You've gotta love journalists (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys are magic. Measuring an angular velocity in linear units.
Is it just me or is there something about journalists where, in technical articles, they have to put in gratuitous meaningless figures for no reason? Maybe it's to prove that they understand the subject.
Irrelevance be damned!
yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
We're contributing to climate change, without a doubt, but mother earth herself has a much greater say than our race.
That said, humans are amazingly resourceful, I think we'll do fine with global warming, we'll move up and inland as the ocean rises, no big deal in the long run. We can ship food and people can move relatively freely on the planet, so I don't expect rising oceans or desertification to be nearly as bad as most imagine it.
What I worry about are the toxic chemicals we're dumping, that's something mommy nature really CAN'T deal with well. It'll suck pretty hard if the oceans are reduced to plankton and jellyfish, I sort of like vertebrates. We need to start taxing every pound of plastic produced or something, and start making our 'disposable' commodities (computers, coffee cups, cars) more biodegradeable or recycleable.
Re:my thoughts (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't a problem with environmentalists -- not real ones, anyway. It's a problem with people use the environment to push their own personal agenda -- like promoting their personal choice in recreation (hiking is a good example), by 'preserving' public land using a definition that only allows human use in the form of hiking, with no other way to access the area, or recreate in it (even horseback riding is verboten). This, of course, doesn't go well with the rest of the voting public that prefers to recreate in other ways, and often paints a negative image of environmentalism in general.
Real environmentalists look at the facts and are willing to say that it's better to go with a less damaging source of power, than it is to stonewall for decades demanding a perfect source of power, forcing us to use the current/old massively polluting methods. (The damage there is already done, goes the mantra of the stonewall crowd.)
Honestly, the faux environmentalists seem more like religious fanatacists: The similarities are striking - they use their cause (environment or diety/dogma) to support their (frequently narrow) worldview, often in disagreement with non-fanatics of the same group. This allows the fanatics to strike down any kind of disagreement (even facts) with impunity, and en masse. The result is the same to those of us who at least attempt to reason: It gives the group (either environmentalism or religion) an undeserved and unfair black eye.
Re:Kyoto (Score:5, Insightful)
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
Re:Mix and match! (Score:3, Insightful)
My biggest beef about nukes is that we have the highest damn electrical rates in the country because ComEd overbuilt the damn things in Illinois and manage them poorly.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mix and match! (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to like space travel, but the Columbia shuttle incident shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like sex, but AIDS shows just how bad an accident could get.
I mean, seriously, are you honestly trying to make this sort of argument? In the development of any technology or process, mistakes are made, and they are learned from. Are you under the impression that there's never been a fatal accident at a coal-based power plant, in the history of their development? Are you under the impression that there have never been accidents with dams? With the development of air travel? Space travel?
Here's a news flash for you: production of energy, at its most basic level, involves the harnessing of an exothermic -- or at least exergonic -- reaction, either chemical or nuclear, at some level or another. This essentially means that if you are dealing with large amounts of energy all concentrated in one place, there always remains the distinct possibility that it could all blow up in your face.
This is true of every single energy production method that actually generates large amounts of energy in a small space. Wind and solar aren't dangerous because the amount of energy generated per square foot is very small; and this is exactly what makes them (at this point in time) unworkable solutions for large scale energy production.
For everything else, you're dealing with potentially explosive, volatile (but hopefully controlled) chemical or nuclear reactions. That's how you get the energy out of them. (Fusion may be an exception).
However, despite the fact that your car runs by constantly harnessing the energy produced by an exploding gasoline/air mixture, it itself doesn't explode. Why is this? Engineering. See, despite the fact that gasoline is volatile (less so now than fuels used in the past, when combustion engines were first being developed) we have figured out how to stabilize engines running on them. They don't blow up in your face. But I'm willing to bet you that when people were first messing around with driving pistons by explosive force, someone got hurt. It was inevitable. It's part of the process.
Look, no one likes accidents, but the Chernobyl thing is silly to bring up. In terms of design, it's like comparing modern cars to Pintos, and concluding that every car will behave that way in an accident -- but Chernobyl, like the Pinto, was flawed from an engineering perspective, not from a technology perspective. When the Pinto was recalled, people didn't say, "Man, this automobile technology is bunk, let's never use it again, and use pogosticks for transportation from now on", they said, "Damn, Ford sure fucked up the design of that car. Let's never design cars like that again."
Throw in the word nuclear, and suddenly, everyone is saying, "Yeah, Chernobyl was poorly designed, and to boot, the operators were running it in a deliberately unsafe manner, and there was an accident; so let's stop the development of nuclear energy completely, and just use our radioactive reserves to build weapons of mass destruction instead." I mean, WHAT?
If someone had suggested that same idea wrt to automobile technology right after the Pinto incident, people would have rightly thought he was looney. But if it's nu-cu-lar, well, darn! I guess that logic makes perfect sense!
Nevermind that current reactor designs are completely different from Chernobyl's, and that the same accident would not be possible again, even if they tried.
Yeah, let's just kill the most promising means of producing renewable, clean energy because, during early development of the engineering principles needed to control such a powerful reaction, an accident occured. Let's wax lyrical about wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power solutions solving all our problems when a) they don't scale b) are prohibitively expensive and c) have problems
Re:Kyoto (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is there an assumption... (Score:2, Insightful)
The money it takes to recover from each environmental "disaster" is real, it stands for human labor and time spent gathering, processing, and applying materials to rebuild economies. We do not have an infinite amount of labor or money to adapt, so we need an answer that helps us live as peacefully as possible.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, your point is brought up often, either mentioned as buildings or forests. Buildings channel wind energy, while windmills more-or-less absorb it. Buildings alter the flow of wind, have you ever noticed the wind tunnel effect near some buildings? Sure buildings will absorb some of the wind's kinetic energy, but that is through frictional shear and is relatively small.
Windmills, on the other hand, are 'moving' against the wind, thereby absorbing wind energy. The wind is constantly pushing the turbine, fighting the back-EMF of the generator, and the windmills thus do extract the kinetic energy of the wind.
The way this affects the planet's weather is to consider thermal transports, through the jet stream and gulf stream, for example. Slowing down these streams, by extracting the kinetic energy of the flows, will slow the transfer of heat being carried by these streams. Result - more heat gets 'dumped' closer to the equator, less heat makes it to the poles.
Effects of thermal streams is greatly important. Look at a World Map [wikipedia.org], and compare cities in Northeastern USA and Canada with European cities at the same latitude. The European cities are MUCH warmer, thanks to lots of air and ocean currents carrying them heat. Now if these currents are interrupted, that means less heat flowing to these places.
An analogy I came up with previously is the following. Imagine Springfield every day sends 10 trucks full of boiling water to Shelbyville. There's two energies at play here - the kinetic energy of the truck to deliver the boiling water, and the heat energy within the boiling water itself. The heat energy keeps Shelbyville warmer than it would be if the water never arrived. Now assume the trucks carry exactly enough fuel to just barely make it to Shelbyville on nice smooth roads. If we go and add friction to these roads (say dig some ditches on the way) the truck won't make it all the way, and the heat energy of the boiling water will be given off somewhere else. The results - Shelbyville gets colder, and the area between Springfield and Shelbyville gets warmer. Note that the heat energy can be much greater than the kinetic energy needed to stop the flow, so windfarms have the ability to affect much greater energy scales then they produce.
Okay, now I'm really glad scientists have modelled this wind-power study, because I've been proposing ecologists do it for years. Climate is a very tricky thing to calculate, because so many factors are intricately woven together. But the fact that this is finally being studied by people claiming to be independent professionals give me some relief.
Re:Why is there an assumption... (Score:3, Insightful)
The real danger to bio-diversity is when the climate changes quickly. That leads to mass extinction, and at times like that, the top of the food chain, and the specialist species are most at risk.
Some depressing math.. hope you like windmills (Score:4, Insightful)
Oil alone;
MBPD = million barrels per day
Average US consumption of oil per day: ~22MBPD
World Consumption: ~85-90MBPD
Energy in a barrel of oil: ~6.1e9 J
1kWh = 3.61e6 Joules.
Doing some numbers: 1 barrel of oil ~1700kWh
1700kWh/barrel x 22e6 barrels/day x 365day/year =
1.37e13 kWh - Yes, that's 10^13
How many windmills is that?
Let's assume medium-sized windmills for an average - 500kW units. Those are some big honking windmills, but not impractical.
How much energy will one of those provide assuming a 50% cycle (a little on the high end, but hey, let's be optimists) over the course of a year?
500kW x 24h/day x 365d x 0.5 = 2.2e6kWh
1.37e13kWh / 2.2e6 kWh = ~6,234,000 windmills. That's six MILLION windmills.
In short.. fusion, hot or cold, or someone better find out how to extract energy from the quantum vacuum (e.g. casimir effect [wikipedia.org]) or we're all fu.. er, finished.
Re:No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good Post. Energy problems are not technological problems. Technology is a McGuffin [chicagoboyz.net]:
The real debate is not about the technology. It is about who will be the rider and who will be the horse. Who will have the whip in his hand and who will bear the lash patiently.
My favorite debaters are the environmental advocates (many related to an assassinated President) who feel very strongly that the United States needs renewable energy sources but not where the machines can be seen from their summer homes. Then there are who insist that all of our energy problems can be solved by conservation. Few of them maintain the lifestyles of Bengali Peasants, and some of them own their own airplanes and multiple mansions.
There is no hope of progress until such time, if ever, as there is a recognition that there are problems that need to be solved, that the solutions to these problems will impose costs and create benefits, that the costs must be shared across society on an equitable basis and in proportion to the benefits received (no free riders) and that the benefits must be shared on an equitable basis and in proportion to the costs paid (capitalism is the only economic system).
There can be no sacred cows or caribou or snail darters. The residents of New York will have to bear the (very slim) risk of an adverse event at Indian Point and probably 2 or 3 other nuclear plants as well, the Kennedys will have to look at a bunch of wind machines and the folks in Nevada will have to deal with Yucca Mountain and die in the knowledge that 10,000 years from now it may leak (the Pyramids are only 4500 years old). These are all costs that we will have to bear and there will be more of them and others. Taxes will go up. Energy prices will go up. Prices of appliances, buildings and automobiles will go up.
Technology will not make the cost problem go away. It cannot. There is no such thing as a free lunch, that is a law of both physics and economics. If we want to have energy we will have to incur and allocate costs for it. That is a political and economic, not a technological, problem.
Re:Nucular (Score:2, Insightful)
Meltdowns are never inevitable, either.
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
No, not nuclear, at least not today. (Score:3, Insightful)
But this being a push for the Nuclear lobby? No thanks. No, I'm not a conspiracy nut who refuses to acknowledge that a properly run fision plant built to modern specs can be run safely
Until Nuclear -fusion- is possible here on Earth, or unless someone figures out that solar panels will cool the Sun, I think I'll take my fusion energy from the sky.
Yes, Solar is more expensive
Of course, I will gladly watch wind and hydro generators replace "clean coal" (that damned coughing eagle!) and hold back fision lobbies, as pointed out wind is still more friendly by far than those sources. But in the end the only good solutions are going to be solar, fusion and if the Sim folks are right, Helium3.
Re:Jousting at windmills (Score:3, Insightful)
Relativity doesn't match "common sense". Quantum mechanics doesn't match "common sense". If it goes beyond the experiences of the every day your "common sense" is not suited to extrapolating results and whether or not something matches common sense you better check and recheck your results. (Until you've checked their model thoroughly you're not in a position to dismiss it out of hand).
Science is not about fudging the results so they match "common sense". its that attitude that prevented the heliocentric solar system from being the standard model for many years. No offence intended but I think its you who fell asleep in science class.
Re:No magic bullet to generate power yet. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no "one true energy" - people that say so are usually selling something. Everything has advantages and disadvantages.
Because there are better, cheaper alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys:
Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.
Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking
My B.S. alarm is ringing. (Score:3, Insightful)
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen. The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
So they created a computer model, which when run indicated drastic temperature shifts across the globe. And yet they don't know by which mechanism this occurred????
Obfuscated Code contests aside, if a computer programmer can't figure out out how his program came up with the answer that it produced, then he either lied about his C.S. degree or he's trying to sell you snake oil.
Probably a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
The results of this research doesn't surprise me in the least. I agree that the actual results may be a bit different, but the general result is almost a no-brainer.
For the most part, winds are convection currents -- generated by the difference in temperature and humidity between different spots in the world -- but heat is the serious driver in this. As an overall results, physics will call for an equalization of states -- this means cooling the equator and heating the poles.
Windmills bleed off some of the kinetic energy from this process, as such, they're almost guaranteed to slow the process of pumping heat from the equator to the poles.
This is, however, probably a good thing, because other studies have concluded that the arctic will be (and has been) more affected by global warming than the temperate and tropical regions, so slowing the process would actually help to cut back some of the side effects of global warming, and possibly help to protect the polar ice caps (and thus moderate the resulting ocean level rise).
It's not a question if projects like this on a large scale would affect the weather. The answer to that is a no-brainer (yes). The question is how, and (probably more importantly) how we could most beneficially manage the resulting side-effects.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, in the end any electricity we make gets turned into heat somewhere by whatever device uses it.
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I just had to say it. Apart from that, I find it a bit funny to see that on one side a lot of people reject the thought that burning fossil fuel is a major factor in the global heating, because 'it isn't sufficiently proved', but the all jump at this one, which is not in the least as well founded, scientifically.
This is not to say that I don't think the result is valid; but if one accepts this result, there is no good reason to reject that our pollution with CO2 etc is causing the global heating; and that if we want to improve our outlook, we must take steps now by drastically reducing our burning of fossil fuel.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's quite obvious from your examples and attempted explanation that you've entirely misunderstood the arguments of not only myself but also authors in the article.
You conclude that fossil fuels and nuclear energy have a positive net heat output while windpower has zero net heat output. Therefore windpower is better. I'll believe you if you quantatively model global climactic effects of harnessing the wind vs. the positive heat output of the other methods you mention.
You bluntly state windmill effects will be "miniscule". If that is so obvious prove it! For starters perhaps you could read the original article and then get back to me.
Global climatology is a difficult study, there are millions of factors all intricately woven together. I've never claimed windpower is better or worse than any other power generation method, I've pointed out possible global climate effects that COULD occur from widespread windfarm deployment. Whether these are better or worse than other energy generation methods I leave to seasoned climatologists.
Anyway, as per your assertion, please quantitatively prove wind power is better than the other methods. People like to disprove me by basing their decision on one of many factors (in your case net heat output) while ignoring all other factors.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:3, Insightful)
Solar would increase heat via the albido effect
and wind power changes the heat distribution which is also very important.
There is no ideal solution only lots of comprimising ones, you just pick the least comprimising.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
Especially since there's an outside chance that the atmosphereic CO2 levels could get worse a lot faster than anticipated. Climatologists are just now getting hip to the fact that the Earth's oceans are acting as giant carbon dioxide sinks [bbc.co.uk] by the exact same mechanism we remove CO2 from our blood streams.
This mechanism is an equilibrium between CO2 (gaseus) and carbonic acid (liquid). A shift in the pH of the oceans may indicate that the ability of them to soak up 'excess' carbon dioxide is nearly exceeded. Which would cause CO2 to just build up in the atmosphere. This would cause a dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 almost regardless of policy decisions made by us (short of not emmitting any more CO2 at all!). Not to mention the marine life that would be deleteriously effected by a shift in pH long before.
Re:Solar efficiency is just fine, thank you. (Score:3, Insightful)
It also snows in most areas of the US, reducing power output significantly. Plus there's the headaches involved with having either no power at night, or having to rely on other sources of energy during that time. (Again, a real problem in more northern latitudes).
Interview on NPR was MUCH more informative... (Score:3, Insightful)
The bottom line is...
the results are inconclusive, and this needs to be studied more. It is quite possible that the predicted changes would be a good thing. My interpretation of this: While global warming tries melt the ice caps, this would cool them off.
The researcher also pointed out that the models were so rough, things could be quite different from what they predicted in this preliminary study.
What about all the energy WASTED (Score:1, Insightful)
See a recent issue of National Geographic which shoes the methane (or whatever it is) burnoff from oil refineries - why isn't that worth capturing. Ever drive through Texas and wonder why those enormous gas flames atop the refineries there are heating up the night sky ?
The real issue as I see it is not how to generate more energy more efficiently with less environmental impact.
The issue is how to use that energy much more efficiently than we do now.
I don't think the generation of energy is anywhere near as significant an issue as the WASTE of energy that is taking place all the time !
it's a "no brainer" (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike greenhouse gas emissions, the effect is immediately reversible (CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, but wind farms could be stopped or removed), and it mostly counteracts the consequences of the greenhouse effect (e.g., it creates arctic cooling).
The author himself states that he thinks that this is unquestionably preferable to greenhouse gases--he called it a "no brainer", actually.
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, and "the Greens" don't agree with your knee-jerk, emotional approval of nuclear power, either.
Come back when you are willing to have a rational debate, without presupposing that everybody who disagrees with you must be irrational.
Re:Probably not gonna be significant... (Score:4, Insightful)
IANAC (I am not a climatologist), but I do live in Finland. It's cold here, but not nearly as cold as the same latitude in Canada.
If I were at the same latitude in Canada as I am now in Finland, I'd be somewhere around the level of Hudson's Bay, with only a few Inuit to keep me company.
I don't have a globe in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that Barcelona is at about the same latitude as New York City. I've spent some summer days in both, and the difference is huge.
Something is keeping Europe relatively warm, and I'm pretty sure the Gulf Stream has a lot to do with it.
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
When you say "match the natural radioactivity of the seas" do you mean that if we dumped 50% of the slugs into the oceans and it all got distributed evenly it'd double the radiation of the Earth's water, or do you mean something else?
That it would double the radioactivity.
I suppose if we can trust our nuclear waste storage to not radiate the deserts/mountains/Indian reservations of our own country, then the bottom of the ocean would seem plenty safe (and it would seem to my squishy mind that the odds of 50% of the slugs being pulverized down there wouldn't be too high). Perhaps we feel safer with the waste where we know clearly where it is, and where we'd be able to detect and hopefully respond to any kind of disaster.
The slugs would, under the proposals I've seen, be some sort of pseudo-ceramic material with the waste mixed into the material in the center. They would act like a bunker-buster bomb, but without the explosion -- shaped to hit the soft mud of the sea bed and sink down, under their own momentum, burying themselves. The mud is hundreds of feet thick in spots, providing excellent shielding of its own, as well as preventing access from most lifeforms, including our own. The chance of it being recovered in 25,000 years is minimal. After 25k years, most of the very radioactive isotopes have decayed, greatly decreasing its radioactivity. However, in the long term, the mud would slowly compress into rock over the period of a few million years, and end up on the top of some mountain chain tens of millions of years later, a strange fossil of lead and some almost harmless low radioactive isotopes. Unless its close to a subduction zone in the crust. In that case, it will be but a drop of extra radioactivity in the great volume of molten, flowing rock of the mantel, and we won't have to worry about it.
And we might also be better off putting it where we know about the local plant and animal life. There's still a lot we don't know about the ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean. If those organisms could somehow eat away at the containment vessels, we could have a big problem.
Not likely. We have recoved clay pots from the seafloor that are thousands of years old. Under this proposal, we would be burying them under a few hundred feet of mud, in an inedible packaging.
A seafloor mud disposal is desireable because it prevents another civilization digging up the materials in a few thousand years. (Sure, we'll leave them with thousands of landfills, all filled with interesting materials of varying toxicity, and sooner or later, many of them will leak toxins into the water supply, but we are paranoid about letting them die slowly of radioactivity. Dying slowly of heavy-metal toxins is okay though.) The downside of a seafloor mud disposal is political -- we have treaties against dropping nuclear waste on the seafloor, as well as the wacko extremist environmentalists, and a public that fears anything nuclear or radioactive.
Re:Why is there an assumption... (Score:4, Insightful)
The ecosystem will adapt, it always has, some species will be losers, some will be winners. The question is: which will homo sapiens be, a winner or a loser? The losers tend to be those at the top of the pile when it was kicked over (i.e. us), the winners tend to be little things living at the bottom of the food chain. The Permian-Triassic extinction event wiped out 70% of all land species and 95% of all marine ones. For some time after the dominant form of life was fungus. I don't know about you, but I'm happy reading about that in a book, I don't particularly feel the urge to experience an "adjusting" ecosystem at first hand.
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the heck not? You certainly can waste your way into a worse future. If you avoid doing that, have you conserved your way to a better future, or what?
Re:Kyoto (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's get our facts straight here. They agreed to it once they got the nod from the EU that if they did support it, then they'd get entry into the WTO. So it really is all about the money for them. Oh, and just for your reference (no registration required)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy
Re:Energy.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually there is no thermodynamic impossibility here. The grandparent poster describes the following cycle:
- Cook a burrito
- Eat burrito, biochemically extract some energy from them
- Use this energy to cook two burritos
Now most of the energy contained in the burrito does not come from the cooking. It comes from the energy-rich materials contained in the beans and other ingredients, which were acquired through biological processes based on solar energy (and a whole lot of chemical reactions revolving around ATP).
So clearly there is nothing impossible in the idea of using some of this energy to heat other burritos. Of course there is a limit on the amount of energy available, and thus on the degee of cooking you can apply.
I know, I'm sad.
Thomas-
Re:Kyoto (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Its widely accepted that externalities (any economic activity which affects someone other than the buyers/sellers involved - such as all of the things you list) make economies work less efficiently and produce less good outcomes. This is a fundamental part of welfare economics - even part of something called the 'First Theorem of Welfare Economics' - and is something any economist should have learnt about.
It's politicians, the media and the general non-economist public who thing of GDP and output as being the one true measure of economic success. In fact, one of the first things many who study any economics at all will learn is just how bad GDP is as a measure of economic welfare. It's not even a particularly great measure of how many goods and services we each get to consume. Just how many people here do you think even know what it measures?
If anything there's a great deal of economic theory to support things like tradeable emissions quotas and taxes on energy and petroleum. And not just because of global climate changes either - there are plenty of more local reason like health problems and the degradation of the urban environments that many live in.
Re:Nucular (Score:4, Insightful)
First use Breeder Reactors so the physical amount of waste is minimal, and cannot be weaponised, and is really efficient per unit mined.
Next up, infuse the waste material into relatively small glass rods, and bury these rods in the Ocean floor (probably mid-Atlantic, most consistent movement) very close to a faultline where the plate is burying itself beneath another. Hey presto, 50 years or so later your waste is buried pretty deep, getting deeper, and in a few centuries is part of our Magma. Problem solved.
Re:Probably a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Wind, wave and solar power all take energy from the climate directly and would affect global heat transport mechanisms, which is not a great thing, although in theory you could mix production to have an overall balancing effect.
Tidal power is the interesting one. Tidal power takes energy from the moons rotation around the world, so taking energy from it will eventually change the moons orbit by reducing its angular velocity, at which point it would start to decend and eventually crash into the earth.
Some quick calulations show that if we were to derive all our energy (estimated to be 5*10^19 J per year) from tidal power, the moon, which has gravitational potential energy of roughly 2* 10^20 jm-1, would lose altitude at roughly 25cm per year and crash into the earth in roughly 1 billion years.
Re:No, even fusion isn't FREE (Score:2, Insightful)
No one ever accounts for the NIMBY (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You've gotta love journalists (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Somewhat Offtopic: Nuclear Reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
His statements shows that he would not look at any new facts or opposing arguments. Reactors are being developed that can't go critical. Based on "under *any* circumstances" (emphasis mine) it means that if nuclear power was the safest, most environmentally safe alternative he wouldn't accept it. That doesn't sound like a person with a rational view on the subject, but one that has made an emotional decision. Emotional decisions aren't bad per se (love, for example), but it does mean you aren't able to have a reasonable discussion with the person on the subject. (Now, if he had said something to the effect of 'I don't accept the current designs' then that would be someone willing to accept new evidence.)
If you say he was being a bit over the top on the topic, I would respond that he can't have it both ways with his statement. Either he is honestly principled and means exactly what he says, or he's playing the part of a typical politician: saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear. I chose to think that he means what he said. YMMV
Environmentalists? SOCIALISTS! (Score:2, Insightful)
From the study:
"The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles."
So they made a computer model and they don't know how it works and why it produces the results that it does. That sure fills me with confidence about their model.
"One unexpected finding to the study is that the hotter temperate zone/cooler Arctic effect exists in the simulations if the wind farms are concentrated in a few spots or scattered across the world."
So they have a computer model that produces the same results regardless of inputs. Yet more indication that their model is broken...
"The mechanism for local temperature changes are the vertical eddies that behemoth windmills ? these monsters can be 30 stories tall and have turbines that spin at 400 kilometres an hour ? would generate."
A turbine spins at 400 kilometers per hour? Huh? Rotation is measured in RPM, not KPH. Unless those turbines are in jet engines I seriously doubt they're moving at more than 0 kph. Anyone's guess as to what a turbine spinning at "400 kph" means.
In short, this sounds like alarmist B.S. Quite frankly it's becoming very clear that while it may have sounded silly in the beginning that it looks entirely obvious that the real agenda of "environmentalists" is economic not environmental.
"Wind power"? Causes global warming.
"Solar power"? Can cause climate change if massively deployed and can harm the local ecosystem.
"Nuclear power"? Enough said.
"Ocean current/tidal power"? Disturbs the coast's ecosystem.
There is no solution that the environmentalists like except reducing consumption of industrialized countries. Their goal is not to cure the environment. Their goal is to redistribute wealth in the world. Every potential new source of energy that they shoot down just makes that more and more clear.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
And what changes does this model predict if we put 24,533,000 kg of carbon dioxide per year into the atmosphere?
Re:Nucular (Score:3, Insightful)