Wind farms vs everything else

The Miller and Keith, Climatic Impacts of Wind Power paper appears to neglect counteraction of the meteorological Coriolis effect. Is it assumed to be negligible?

 

If I am understanding this correctly, although wind turbines warm local/micro surface climate, they do not warm global climate as there is no net heating of the air. Further, oceans do not appear to be involved which is by far the largest heat sink. Also, they do not affect large ice masses such as Antartica, the Arctic, or Greenland.

 

Correct, they mix up the air levels such that the local cooling one experiences at night doesn't happen. Energy isn't added, just moved around. This could have impacts in the local region though.

 

According to the graphic included with the abstract of the paper, warming over the CONUS would apparently be 0.24 degrees C in a hypothetical electricity mix that's 100% wind-generated. Warming over wind farms would be over 0.5 degrees C if I read the graphic correctly.

 

@Bob - did you ever receive a response from the corresponding author?

 

Have not gone through recommended methods of accessing the full Cell article and no longer easily have journal access as in the past, so don't know if further answers to the following were answered within:

If wind turbines redistribute heat to the local surface by mixing the boundary layer, cooler surface air is ejected and distributed elsewhere. Unless heat is trapped at the surface and less heat is ejected into space (beyond the current rate), that cooler air should be redistributed over other non-wind turbine surfaces or oceans. Perhaps that is the answer - that less heat is ejected into space for net global warming.

But if no additional heat is ejected into space, would that not lower the temperatures of those non-wind turbine surfaces and oceans than current trajectories? In that case lower sea and non-wind turbine land surface temperatures would eventually feed back to the land masses covered with wind turbines and cool them, no?

Much ado about nothing?

 

Primarily a redistribution of existing heat, by changing the local surface (and near surface) stratification of temperature differences?

At least, I'm seeing this as a local surface change, not a global surface + full atmosphere + ocean change. There is no massive heat input from something like greenhouse matters.

 

There could be some increased heat from friction as the air is moved around more.