How so?
What would you put in an international treaty to reduce CO2 emissions?
But I think that’s kind of ducking Mr Dibble’s argument. The real issue is not so much “Do we know exactly how much large-scale wind energy generation would affect the climate?” as “Do we have any reason to think that even large-scale wind energy generation would be more than a tiny fraction of the amount it would take to affect the climate?”
I mean, I don’t know the exact odds of having an enraged elephant suddenly bursting into my second-floor Dutch apartment and wreaking havoc, and I don’t think anybody else does either. So in a sense, nobody knows exactly how serious that problem really is.
But I have a fair enough ballpark estimate of the odds to know it’s not a problem I actually need to worry about. And maybe we could get the same kind of order-of-magnitude ballpark estimate for the potential climate threat posed by large-scale wind energy generation.
I think we need a computational physicist stupid enough to be willing to tackle such a problem and smart enough to be able to find an answer to it. Excuse me while I go rout out jshore.
jshore rout-ed…Actually, there has been very little study of this. The one paper that I could find dedicated to this issue is The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate, conveniently available in full online. The abstract reads:
One of their main conclusions is that this area is worthy of more research. Other conclusions include:
(1) Even if windpower were to grow 100-fold, which is more than the upper end envisioned in the next half-century (although is still a fairly modest percentage of the necessary energy supply estimated to be needed), “Our results suggest that the resulting peak changes in seasonal mean temperature might be ~0.5 K, with RMS changes approximately one order of magnitude smaller and near-zero change in global mean temperature … These climatic changes are detectable above background climatic variability in model runs of a few decades in duration, but they might remain too small to detect in the presence of other anthropogenic change and natural climate variability.”
(2) “The direct climatic changes that are due to wind power may be beneficial because they can act to reduce, rather than increase, aggregate climate impacts.”
(3) “It may be comparatively easy to reduce the climatic impacts of wind turbines. Preliminary analysis suggests that turbine designs could be modified to increase the atmospheric efficiency (CP/CD) by several tens of percent and reduce the generation of turbulence by several fold, both of which could be done economically. Additional mitigation of impact might be achieved by siting wind farms such that their effects partially cancel and by tailoring the interaction of turbines with the local topography to minimize the added drag.”
By the way, I think the key point is to find one who is shameless enough to look and find what other people have already done so he doesn’t have to actually try to work it out himself! 
Thanks for doing the legwork, jshore. So, to summarise:
minimal effect, some of which is positive, and redesign could mitigate a lot of the negative?
Thought so.
The “incovenient truths” in Al Gore’s movie.
You should try to find your news from somewhere other than right wing blogs.
Now he is gathering up followers to spread the message:
Good for him. You should go and listen.
When the page begins, “A Blog for Salty Christians,” you really can’t expect us to take it seriously! Not on a scientific question, anyway!
From Azov’s link:
Actually, Bob Carter is a well-known climate change skeptic. Fans of SDMB’s Beechnut will be tickled to hear that Carter is the originator, or at least the popularizer, of the classic “Global warming stopped in 1998, now 8 years of NO global warming” argument that was done to death in this May 2006 thread.
And the “60 leading experts in the field asked for a public review in Canada” story has also been addressed on these boards, but the hamsters are slow and I can’t find the relevant thread.
Articles like those just underline one of the points that stuck with me most from the film. Gore shows a graphic illustration a survey that was done on every peered reviwed scientific article related to Global warming for the last ten years to see what percentage of articles disagreed that GW was real. They literally came up with 0%. Not a single peer-reviewed article disputed that GW was a real phenomenon. Then Gore showed some corporate memos from oil companies and whatnot, saying that “doubt is our friend,” and that they needed to create the “impression of a debate” in the mainstream media. Gore then showed the survey results for articles in the mainstream media and reveals that 53% of mainstream media pieces disputed GW.
The difference between what scientists really think and the impression the media gives of what scientists really think could not be more stark.
And then the 2nd paragraph says, “The earth’s temperature, CO2 levels, and other environmental conditions are well within the norm for the past 1,000 years…” Hmmm…Let’s see. CO2 is currently at 380 ppm. For the last 750,000 years, it has oscillated between ~180 and 300 ppm. (For the last 1000 years but eliminating the last 150, it has been very constant in the range of 280 ± ~10 ppm.) Actually, the current level is believed to be higher than anything in roughly the last 20 million years. But, hey, a thousand years, 20 million years, what’s the difference.
It then goes through the variety of denier talking-points:
(1) Greenland used to be a warm paradise when the Vikings were there.
Ooh, thanks for the blog links, jshore - will make for interesting reading.
By the way, here is the website that the author of that column works for. Note that they are essentially hired guns, performing public relations services for their clients. I don’t know if anybody has been able to determine exactly who his clients are in this case.
If you’re going to be a shill, at least learn from the best. That author cut his teeth at APCO (remember them from the tobacco lobbying campaigns?). Even the High Park Group’s website doesn’t hide the fact that he’s a paid shill. Here is their info on their own director:
Shit, at least try to hide the fact.