Wind farms cause climate change?

Live Science:

A new study suggests that massive wind farms could steer storms and alter the weather if extensive fields of turbines were built, according to a news report.

It is not the first study to come to this conclusion.

The new research is an interesting "what if," but the installation of large wind turbines would have to be taken to the extreme to have the global effects portrayed.

The scientists, Daniel Barrie and Daniel Kirk-Davidoff of the University of Maryland, calculated "what might happen if all the land from Texas to central Canada, and from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains, were covered in one massive wind farm," according to Discovery News. The result of such an unlikely installation: a real serious Butterfly Effect.

Such massive wind farming would slow wind speeds by 5 or 6 mph as the turbines literally stole wind from the air. A ripple effect would occur in the form of waves radiating across the Northern Hemisphere that could, days later, run into storms and alter their courses by hundreds of miles.

The researchers "acknowledged the hypothetical wind farm was far larger than anything humans are likely to build," according to the Web site, but if Department of Energy projections for wind farming are met by 2030 (for the country to get 20 percent of its electricity from wind), "it could probably have an effect," James McCaa of 3Tier, Inc., a renewable energy forecasting company based in Seattle, is quoted as saying.

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Wind is also not caused by trees. This is further proof of how some tie us in knots on any energy proposal. Hat tip to Vern.