UK How the ‘wind farms increase climate change’ myth was created – by Leo Hickman
7/2/2012 Guardian How the ‘wind farms increase climate change’ myth was born. – by Leo Hickman.University of Illinois wind farm researcher responds to how his paper was reported in the media and on the internet
Such is the viral nature of information flow on the internet, we can sometimes
see myths and memes developing before our very eyes. Just such an example has
occurred over recent days with the rather irresistible news that wind farms can
“increase climate change”.
The article that really gave this idea a push online was published on Sunday
evening on the Daily Mail’s website. It was delivered with the headline: “Wind
farms can actually INCREASE climate change by raising temperatures and causing
downpours, warn academics.”
Somewhat predictably, that headline quickly attracted attention and was being
disseminated with particular gusto on climate sceptic sites such as Climate
Depot and JunkScience. The news was also reported on Dallasblog.com (“Wind Farms
Cause Global Warming, some Scientists say”) and then on the Orange County
Register website with the headline: “Another Global Warming Oops Moment.” The
article itself was clearly rejoicing in being able to ladle big dollops of
schadenfreude:
More windmills to fight global warming = more global warming. You have to love
it.
But if we reverse up a bit, we can actually see how this new myth was born. The
Mail – which has a long track record of running stories hostile to wind farms,
and more, widely, climate science – was clearly picking up on a story that day
by Jonathan Leake in the Sunday Times. This story is behind a paywall, but it
ran with a headline that fairly summed up the thrust of the article: “Giant wind
farms can alter weather.” However, the Australian – yet another climate sceptic
paper – has since republished Leake’s article, albeit with a new headline: “Big
wind farms ‘alter climate’, but could be used to control the weather.”
The Leake article, which attempts to summarise some of the research being
conducted into how wind farms might affect localised weather conditions, led
with the findings of a study published by Somnath Roy, an assistant professor of
atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But
Roy’s study was published in 2010. So why has the Sunday Times – again, another
paper that is hostile to wind farms – run it as a news story now? Could it be a
way for the paper to frame the news, contained within the article, that some
Tory MPs have expressed their own hostility to wind farms?
The germ of this current interest in Roy’s study can most likely be pinned to an
article in the New Scientist published on 30 January, entitled: “Power paradox:
Clean might not be green forever.” It covered a lot of very interesting
research, including a passing mention of Roy’s 2010 study. (Interestingly, the
New Scientist itself got into a spot of bother last year over a headline
covering similar research.) But it was an article – as you might expect given it
was reflecting the state of fledgling research into this topic – peppered with
words such as “could”, “possibly” and “might”. It also made it clear that Roy’s
study was focused on how wind farms can affect their local climate (within an
area 300 metres “downwind” from the turbines), not, as might be interpreted from
the Mail’s headline, the much wider phenomenon of “climate change”. In fact,
Roy’s study can be read in full here. (A curio: it appears to be one of the very
last paper’s edited by the late climate scientist Stephen Schneider of Stanford
University.) From the abstract:
Utility-scale large wind farms are rapidly growing in size and numbers all over
the world. Data from a meteorological field campaign show that such wind farms
can significantly affect near-surface air temperatures. These effects result
from enhanced vertical mixing due to turbulence generated by wind turbine
rotors. The impacts of wind farms on local weather can be minimized by changing
rotor design or by siting wind farms in regions with high natural turbulence.
Yesterday, I asked Roy himself to summarise his paper. He said:
My Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper is on local-scale
processes where we find that wind farms may make the nights warmer and days
cooler in their immediate vicinity. Climate change is a longer-term phenomenon
involving process that operate at larger spatial scales…My expertise is in
small-scale (what we call atmospheric boundary layer and/or mesoscale)
processes, not climate. Additionally my paper does not talk about precipitation.
The impacts of the wind farms that I have studied are confined to the lowest
part of the atmosphere. To affect rainfall, the wind farms have to reach pretty
high into the troposphere where clouds are formed. I am familiar with research
done by others on this topic. At this point there is no agreement. Some global
scale studies (pdf) show that extremely large wind farms covering millions of sq
km will affect rainfall. On the other hand, a recent study (pdf) of a
approximately 500 GW wind farm showed that the impact on rainfall would be about
1%.
I then asked him if he felt his 2010 study had been fairly represented this week
in the media. He said that Leake had interviewed him for the Sunday Times
article and that “the 2-3 paragraphs on my research discussed in the body of the
article are a reasonable representation of a PART of our paper”. He added: “The
headline probably reflects the work of other scientists rather than mine.”
We then moved onto the Mail’s article. He said:
I am already getting emails on this. I will have to categorically say that the
headline is not an accurate representation of my work. But I guess there is
little I can do now.
I then showed him how the Mail’s headline was starting to get picked up
elsewhere. He replied:
Wow! Actually I also heard from some colleagues. Strangely, nobody has read the
Sunday Times article or the Nature editorial [from 2010], but everybody knows
about the Daily Mail piece!
And, lo, a myth was born.
Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/07/wind-farms-climate-change-weather