Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study

Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study. The law of unintended consequences strikes again! It’s logical; windmills convert wind energy to electricity and some additional energy is lost due to mechanical friction, blade intertia, etc. Thus, windmills reduce the amount of energy available as wind – wind is one driver of weather so if you drain off enough wind energy, you change the weather. Defcon 5 Irony alert!

This post was last modified on April 29, 2012

Bonfire of the Absurdities: After 35 year career writing software for IBM mainframes, am now self-employed contractor thinking of joining a union and striking for higher wages. Cured morbid fear of heights when I learned to look at them as lengths standing on end. Uncompromising in refusal to accept browser cookies. Amateur investor who has accumulated a small fortune in the market after starting out years ago with a large one. For recreation, I run, hike, kayak and play tennis but will not consider synchronized swimming under any circumstances.

View Comments (20)

  • Is this like a double oxymoron? Global warming is bad - windmills help reduce global warming - windmills cause global warming. I say it's the weather and the windmills probably had nothing to do with it other than they happen to be where it's been hotter. If it cools off in the same place in the next year some retard will claim it's global cooling, or that global warming caused the windmills to suddenly cool the same area off. Perhaps if they reverse the rotation it will cause a local ice age.

  • It's because they set some of them up in front of Al the Goricle's place, (AKA Manbearpig). The hot air from this location alone heated up the windmills until they popped.

  • Windmills are just weather since they're localized. They aren't "climate change," right? I think that's how Gore's reasoning is supposed to work.

  • Actually, it's a good thing that windmills contribute to global warming. It's happening just in time, since we're heading back into our "worrying about global cooling" phase of propaganda.

  • OK, maybe windmills will help increase globull warming, but it's all OK, because they are cutting down on the need for oil!
    As long as they never need to be lubricated.

  • why not hook up stationary bikes to generate electricity, a bunch of them, in cities all over, and then employ those currently (sic) unemployed to operate them?

  • What about all those windmills that Pete Townshend did during his guitar solos? Do we need to worry about that, too?