4 ms·

Fascinating. It sounds like they believe this is a part of a normal ocean pattern. I wonder what effect climate change will have on wind speed.

by foota 7y ago

dwnwudp 7y ago
So we design a global network of wind turbines so powerful that they buffer climate change...like adding a huge mass to stabilize the dynamics?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Compared to the amount of power in the weather system what we puny humans can do it insignificant. A typical wind turbine causes a slow-down behind it but that's only in the layer that windmill sits in. Given that the atmosphere's active airmass extends many 100's of time above the height of the highest windmills and windmills will only ever cover a very small fraction of the surface area of the planet their effect is negligible.
  - Applejinx 7y ago
    Yes. Anything we can do is a millionth of the size of the flowing climate, its temperatures and airmasses. It becomes a heck of a potential power source, but nothing we do with windmills is going to have the least effect on it.
- krastanov 7y ago
  Nothing we do directly compares. For instance, the waste heat from coal plants is insignificant compared to the energies in the atmosphere. Same with any other energy scales we can reach with our technology. The climate emergency is happening because we made a blanket to capture the energy of the sun on a planetary scale, not because we directly added heat to the atmosphere by burning stuff.
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    There is a little bit of climate change feedback by getting more power from windmills, because that means, roughly speaking, we can shut down more carbon-spewing plants.
  - strainer 7y ago
    Studies are finding waste heat from thermo-electric plants may not be insignificant. In this study [1] "energy consumption" is a shorthand for all human heat emissions from combustion engines, industrial processes and thermo-electric plant generation / consumption, etc. A large portion of human heat release can be attributed to thermo-electric generation. Electricity consumption accounts for 18% of energy use, with generation around 30% efficient that means coal,gas and oil power stations account for somewhere around half of global fossil fuel burn. [2] From: Nature - A new global gridded anthropogenic heat flux dataset with high spatial resolution and long-term time series (2019) [1] > For example, Zhang et al.5 found that energy consumption could lead to increases in winter and autumn temperatures of up to 1 °C in the mid- and high latitudes across North America and Eurasia. Ichinose et al.1 found that the maximum anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in central Tokyo, Japan, was as high as 1,590 W/m2 in winter, resulting in warming to a maximum of 2.5 °C. Moreover, anthropogenic heat can affect wind speed because it reduces the stability of the boundary layer and enhances vertical mixing. In view of the effects of anthropogenic heat on climate at local and continental scales and the increasing consumption of energy worldwide, the potential significance of anthropogenic heat as it relates to global climate change over a long-term period should be further studied using techniques such as global climate models. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...
- atoav 7y ago
  I think even if we manage to make the best of the situation, weld still be economically worse off, because of all the harbour cities which will be reclaimed by the sea and all the lost land mass
Applejinx 7y ago
Not mysterious. This is perfectly in line with expected science. Climate is a huge chaotic system, akin to how Jupiter's Great Red Spot persists as a chaotic phenomenon. It's impossible to predict in detail, but follows some general principles we can depend on, and the generalization 'wind speeds are increasing' is one of those principles. As we increase the energy of the overall system (by heating it), the range of weather behavior grows more extreme and more chaotic. Pretty sure this has at least as good a claim on observed wind speeds increasing, as any ocean pattern. So the range of behavior will expand (higher peak speeds) and the rapidity with which the weather can change will also expand (is expanding). That poses dangers but if you can capture and store the energy it also gives opportunities: the danger is simply that expanded storms will smash our civilization, but the opportunity is that sufficiently sturdy generating equipment can harvest a LOT of power in a big hurry. Our ability to expend energy (even in so catastrophic a way as thermonuclear war) is NOTHING to the power of heating climate. We only think it is a certain way because we're used to seeing it that way. There effectively is no such thing as the 'thousand year' storm anymore. It becomes commonplace, and design has to take on challenges like the million or billion year storm… as calculated under last century's conditions. Because that's how chaos works: small increases in total energy can give rise to increasingly spectacular chaotic flows. One thing about it, it's fairly likely that any particular extreme will blow over more quickly. It all becomes a challenge of 'survive what climate threw at you during this 48 or 72 hours' and it'll likely change very aggressively again, perhaps to something a lot more survivable. You prepare for weather events like they are 'shock and awe' military assaults, no matter where you are in the world, because that's how it increasingly is. Wind speed is only one part of it, but it's certainly a significant part for unprotected humans and human structures.
- Merrill 7y ago
  Although there may be more total energy in the atmosphere, the polar regions are warming faster than the tropics. This would seem to decrease the temperature gradient as a function of latitude and slow convection. It must be that average wind speeds are mainly determined by the vertical temperature gradient as a function of altitude?
  - 7y ago

Fascinating. It sounds like they believe this is a part of a normal ocean pattern. I wonder what effect climate change will have on wind speed.

by foota 7y ago

Fascinating. It sounds like they believe this is a part of a normal ocean pattern. I wonder what effect climate change will have on wind speed.

dwnwudp 7y ago

So we design a global network of wind turbines so powerful that they buffer climate change...like adding a huge mass to stabilize the dynamics?

jacquesm 7y ago
Compared to the amount of power in the weather system what we puny humans can do it insignificant. A typical wind turbine causes a slow-down behind it but that's only in the layer that windmill sits in. Given that the atmosphere's active airmass extends many 100's of time above the height of the highest windmills and windmills will only ever cover a very small fraction of the surface area of the planet their effect is negligible.
- Applejinx 7y ago
  Yes. Anything we can do is a millionth of the size of the flowing climate, its temperatures and airmasses. It becomes a heck of a potential power source, but nothing we do with windmills is going to have the least effect on it.
krastanov 7y ago
Nothing we do directly compares. For instance, the waste heat from coal plants is insignificant compared to the energies in the atmosphere. Same with any other energy scales we can reach with our technology. The climate emergency is happening because we made a blanket to capture the energy of the sun on a planetary scale, not because we directly added heat to the atmosphere by burning stuff.
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  There is a little bit of climate change feedback by getting more power from windmills, because that means, roughly speaking, we can shut down more carbon-spewing plants.
- strainer 7y ago
  Studies are finding waste heat from thermo-electric plants may not be insignificant. In this study [1] "energy consumption" is a shorthand for all human heat emissions from combustion engines, industrial processes and thermo-electric plant generation / consumption, etc. A large portion of human heat release can be attributed to thermo-electric generation. Electricity consumption accounts for 18% of energy use, with generation around 30% efficient that means coal,gas and oil power stations account for somewhere around half of global fossil fuel burn. [2] From: Nature - A new global gridded anthropogenic heat flux dataset with high spatial resolution and long-term time series (2019) [1] > For example, Zhang et al.5 found that energy consumption could lead to increases in winter and autumn temperatures of up to 1 °C in the mid- and high latitudes across North America and Eurasia. Ichinose et al.1 found that the maximum anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) in central Tokyo, Japan, was as high as 1,590 W/m2 in winter, resulting in warming to a maximum of 2.5 °C. Moreover, anthropogenic heat can affect wind speed because it reduces the stability of the boundary layer and enhances vertical mixing. In view of the effects of anthropogenic heat on climate at local and continental scales and the increasing consumption of energy worldwide, the potential significance of anthropogenic heat as it relates to global climate change over a long-term period should be further studied using techniques such as global climate models. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0143-1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Electricity_generation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...
atoav 7y ago
I think even if we manage to make the best of the situation, weld still be economically worse off, because of all the harbour cities which will be reclaimed by the sea and all the lost land mass

Applejinx 7y ago

Not mysterious. This is perfectly in line with expected science. Climate is a huge chaotic system, akin to how Jupiter's Great Red Spot persists as a chaotic phenomenon. It's impossible to predict in detail, but follows some general principles we can depend on, and the generalization 'wind speeds are increasing' is one of those principles. As we increase the energy of the overall system (by heating it), the range of weather behavior grows more extreme and more chaotic. Pretty sure this has at least as good a claim on observed wind speeds increasing, as any ocean pattern. So the range of behavior will expand (higher peak speeds) and the rapidity with which the weather can change will also expand (is expanding). That poses dangers but if you can capture and store the energy it also gives opportunities: the danger is simply that expanded storms will smash our civilization, but the opportunity is that sufficiently sturdy generating equipment can harvest a LOT of power in a big hurry. Our ability to expend energy (even in so catastrophic a way as thermonuclear war) is NOTHING to the power of heating climate. We only think it is a certain way because we're used to seeing it that way. There effectively is no such thing as the 'thousand year' storm anymore. It becomes commonplace, and design has to take on challenges like the million or billion year storm… as calculated under last century's conditions. Because that's how chaos works: small increases in total energy can give rise to increasingly spectacular chaotic flows. One thing about it, it's fairly likely that any particular extreme will blow over more quickly. It all becomes a challenge of 'survive what climate threw at you during this 48 or 72 hours' and it'll likely change very aggressively again, perhaps to something a lot more survivable. You prepare for weather events like they are 'shock and awe' military assaults, no matter where you are in the world, because that's how it increasingly is. Wind speed is only one part of it, but it's certainly a significant part for unprotected humans and human structures.

Merrill 7y ago
Although there may be more total energy in the atmosphere, the polar regions are warming faster than the tropics. This would seem to decrease the temperature gradient as a function of latitude and slow convection. It must be that average wind speeds are mainly determined by the vertical temperature gradient as a function of altitude?
- 7y ago