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Looks normal enough. What was that desperate climate emergency again?

Drift ice in Okhotsk Sea at sunrise.

Previous posts showed 2022 Arctic Ice broke the 15M km2 ceiling in February, staying above that level the first week of March, then followed by typical melting in March. As the chart below shows, mid March the overall ice extent was ~400k km2 below the 16 year average, before returning to the mean day 89 and tracking the average since then.

Note the much higher ice extents in 2022 compared to 2021 or 2007.  The green lines show that the above normal ice this year is despite low extents in Sea of Okhotsk.  The averages in dark green (excluding Okhotsk) are below 2022 in light green (excluding Okhotsk) by nearly 200k km2.  IOW everywhere in the Arctic except Okhotsk ice extents are well above average.  Remember also that Okhotsk basin is outside the Arctic circle, has no Polar bears, and is among the…

As the mantra has it, wind turbines are the perfect panacea for rising temperatures. The ever fearful fret about the planet’s temperature rising a couple of notches (apparently an increase of just 1.5°C means instant disaster and pumping it up by 2°C means an irreversible catastrophe).

Now it seems that these things are playing their part in adjusting temperatures, but not in the manner hoped for or predicted.

Study after study shows local nighttime temperatures rising by as much as 1.5°C, wherever these things are operating.

None of this would come as a surprise to grape and fruit growers who, in chillier climes, use frost fans in their vineyards and orchards to stir up the air at nighttime to prevent frosts ruining their crops.

The climate cult is driven by a (clearly burning) desire to spear millions of these things into everyone else’s backyards (not theirs, of course). So, instead of keeping a lid on global temperatures, their drive to spread wind turbines far and wide will have precisely the opposite result.

What other effects these things have on the broader climate is a matter of further debate, as David Wojick outlines below.

Do wind farms change the weather?
CFACT
David Wojick
8 March 2022

The effect of lots of wind turbines on weather and climate is a small but active research area. Wind power converts wind energy into electricity, thereby removing that energy from the air.

The research issue of how taking a lot of energy out might affect weather or climate seems to have emerged as early as 2004. Studies range from the global climate impact down to the local effects of a single large wind facility.

Here is a nontechnical article on a key global climate scale paper in 2011: “Wind and wave farms could affect Earth’s energy balance“in New Scientist magazine, March 30, 2011. Must register to read here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028063-300-wind-and-wave-farms-could-affect-earths-energy-balance/

Here is the seminal technical paper: “Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences” by L. M. Miller, F. Gans, and A. Kleidon; Earth System Dynamics, February 11, 2011. Article is open access here:

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/2/1/2011/

This lengthy Abstract explains the physics:

“The availability of wind power for renewable energy extraction is ultimately limited by how much kinetic energy is generated by natural processes within the Earth system and by fundamental limits of how much of the wind power can be extracted. Here we use these considerations to provide a maximum estimate of wind power availability over land. We use several different methods. First, we outline the processes associated with wind power generation and extraction with a simple power transfer hierarchy based on the assumption that available wind power will not geographically vary with increased extraction for an estimate of 68 TW. Second, we set up a simple momentum balance model to estimate maximum extractability which we then apply to reanalysis climate data, yielding an estimate of 21 TW. Third, we perform general circulation model simulations in which we extract different amounts of momentum from the atmospheric boundary layer to obtain a maximum estimate of how much power can be extracted, yielding 18–34 TW. These three methods consistently yield maximum estimates in the range of 18–68 TW and are notably less than recent estimates that claim abundant wind power availability. Furthermore, we show with the general circulation model simulations that some climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. We conclude that in order to understand fundamental limits to renewable energy resources, as well as the impacts of their utilization, it is imperative to use a “top-down” thermodynamic Earth system perspective, rather than the more common “bottom-up” engineering approach.”

Their conclusion at the end is that maximizing global wind development could have as big an effect on climate as the climate models give for doubling CO2, which is a lot. Thus if you took out all the energy possible by wind the climate effects might be big. And this is just for land based wind towers, so a lot of offshore wind should add to this effect.

The “related articles” section of this paper lists several earlier articles, as well as several discussing this paper. Also, Google Scholar lists 110 newer papers that cite this one, some of which are on the topic of the weather or climate impacts of energy removal by wind power. In addition, if you click on Google Scholar’s “Related articles” button you get another hundred papers, many of which are directly on the topic of wind power affecting weather and climate.

See https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_vis=1&q=allintitle:+surface+wind+power+author:A+author:Kleidon&hl=en&as_sdt=0,49

Here is an example: “Regional climate model simulations indicate limited climatic impacts by operational and planned European wind farms” in Nature Communications, February 11, 2014.

See https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4196?origin=ppub#citeas

At the extreme end, wind proponent Mark Z. Jacobson has claimed that very large arrays of offshore wind turbines off the U.S. East Coast could actually remove enough atmospheric energy to reduce the damaging energy of major hurricanes. I am not making this up and I think he wants 300,000 MW or so of huge wind machines lining the coast.

See “Taming hurricanes with arrays of offshore wind turbines” in Nature Climate Change, February 26, 2014. https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2120

Clearly, there is a real research question here. However, the results look to be both abstract and speculative at this point. But then, so is the rest of the climate change scare — abstract, speculative and based on questionable models.

It is both amusing and fitting that these alarming climate models find wind power to be just as scary as carbon dioxide. In wind’s case it might even be true because the generators really are sucking energy out of the air, and energy is what makes weather.
CFACT

Who would have thought, hey?