In the grand tradition of Ronald Reagan claiming that trees caused pollution (not true, but they do cause forest fires), the right wing has a new meme: Wind farms cause global warming. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and many other wingnut sources are all over this one:
May 09 2012
New Wingnut Meme: Wind Farms Cause Global Warming!
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Jasper T
May 9, 2012 at 10:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It speaks volumes that they don’t know what global warming is.
Even if it did cause some localized heat retaining, the long term benefit of not continually pumping CO2 into the atmosphere for the equivalent electricity generation easily overcomes the localized warming.
It’s like complaining that CFL/LED lights cost more, so why would you buy them to save money? Because they long term savings more than account for the initial extra cost.
slc1
May 9, 2012 at 10:22 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A debunking of the story by the authors of the study.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201204300004
Dr X
May 9, 2012 at 10:23 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
These imbeciles keep insisting that there is no such thing as AGW, until this week. Now they admit it exists, but attribute it greener technology.
Dr X
May 9, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Naturally, the dumbest man on the internet, aka Jim Hoft, is on the story.
Michael Heath
May 9, 2012 at 10:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve come to conclude that it takes more denialism to deny the fact of global warming and its cause than it does to deny natural selection.
Denial of AGW has become as idiotic and delusional as denying common descent, i.e., the facts are there, well explained with overwhelming evidence, and there’s no more compelling hypotheses left standing, even rational imagined ones.
christophburschka
May 9, 2012 at 10:54 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Nonono, they’ve got it all wrong. Wind farms cause global cooling. The propellers look like giant fans! You know what happens when you switch on a fan? That’s right, it gets colder!
(What, my logic is just as sound as theirs.)
anandine
May 9, 2012 at 11:02 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So if you use a big fan to mix warmer air with cooler air, thus averaging the temperatures between the two areas, so one part of the atmosphere becomes cooler than it would have been and another part becomes cooler, this proves the earth as a whole is not becoming warmer. Now I understand.
spamamander, hellmart survivor
May 9, 2012 at 11:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s true!
Here in eastern Washington there are a lot of wind turbines, often along the ridgelines of the hills. It also regularly hits 100 degrees during the summer! We also only get 8-11 inches of rain a year, so we rely on irrigation, which is often ALSO run by windmills. Not only are the wind turbines causing warming, they are blowing the rain clouds away!
OK, some of those liberal types will say that most of eastern Washington is in a rain shadow from the Cascades, and that it is a “semi-arid steppe region”, and the 300 days of sun along with dry conditions favor hot weather in the summertime, but we know they’re just in denial.
mjmiller
May 9, 2012 at 11:21 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I haven’t been able to see the clip but is the argument anything like the one about Holland staying cool because of the action of all those windmills?
ragarth
May 9, 2012 at 11:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So, to sum it all up:
Global warming doesn’t exist. It’s a left-wing conspiracy to destroy america by encouraging the islamist take-over of the country by the ragheads in the middle-east and the communist slime in China since, if we try to curtail global warming, they gain an advantage over us in the global energy market.
Also, global warming is caused by wind-mills because they increase the local night-time ground temperature. This, also, is part of the ivory tower elitist master plan of destroying america because some True Americans ™ hacked a few researchers and discovered the heinous plot to totally falsify climate change data by using more accurate measurement techniques, ergo the need to invent global warming with green technology such as wind-mills and seal clubbing.
This can all be discovered by news anchors of fox news because those people who study this stuff, spend a decade learning the material, and are nose-deep in the data don’t know anything. True knowledge comes from common-sense bred from thinking about an issue for 3 minutes while drinking a brewski.
Stevarious
May 9, 2012 at 11:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Fox News:
I’m sure they are busily trying to figure out how solar power, gay sex, and liberal politics might also be causing it. ANYthing but their precious fossil fuels.
d cwilson
May 9, 2012 at 11:53 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Typical. On more than one occassion, I’ve seen wingnuts make the argument that even if global warming were real (and it isn’t), we can counteract it by building gigantic air conditioners.
Of course, my all-time favorite scientific illiteracy moment was in a forum in which a creationist went on a massive rant about how evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics and that the only way it could possibly work is if there were an external source that was feeding a constant input of energy to the Earth. He then challenged anyone to point to where scientists have discovered this mysterious energy source.
That was a few years ago. To this day, I’m still not sure he was a Poe.
fifthdentist
May 9, 2012 at 12:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson, I’ve seen the same question posed by fundies: “What big source could there be for all this energy that is bombarding earth?” And think they’re clever for posing it.
Even as a lit/philosophy double major that took me less than a second to figure out, being that the answer is in plain sight.
StevoR
May 9, 2012 at 12:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wait, what!?
Trees cause forest fires? How?
slc1
May 9, 2012 at 12:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re StevoR @ #14
No trees = no forest fires.
Tualha
May 9, 2012 at 12:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m under the impression that Reagan’s comment was prompted by an observation that trees do emit a lot of VOCs, and, due to some VOCs being toxic and the role of VOCs in ozone formation, VOCs are classed as air pollutants. Basically a case of taking two facts way out of context, putting them together, and trumpeting it as if it meant anything.
richardelguru
May 9, 2012 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
fifthdentist
“the answer is in plain sight” but only during the day. They were presumably debating at night, so their error was understandable.
StevoR
May 9, 2012 at 1:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Incidentally, the very first “plants” – anaerobic microbes of some kind actually – “polluted” the Earth’s very early very ancient atmosphere with oxygen and thus changed this planet from one we couldn’t live on to one we could.
Those anaerobic bacteria are still around – varieties of ‘em anyhow – I think anthrax is one example if memory serves.
So is pollution in the eye of the beholder?
Mind you, that natural pollution changed the world bigtime and it has never been the same since – and those microscopic bugs that polluted back then, they aren’t the main species anymore and are reduced to surviving in small nooks and crannies isolated from the hostile new oxygenated world.
Yeah, we might not want to follow that example really.
StevoR
May 9, 2012 at 1:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@slc1 says:
Yes but then the trees aren’t causing the fires to occur anymore than the oxgen in our air which also burns is.
thztds
May 9, 2012 at 1:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@StevoR
You obviously haven’t heard of the latest Fox News report that indicates most So Cal wildfires are caused by invasive shrubbery from south of the border who deliberately set fire to our forests in an attempt to clear land for themselves. This is why it’s illegal to smuggle in plants from outside of the state.
Ben P
May 9, 2012 at 3:00 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Shhh, you’ll bring out the other wingnut environment meme.
“Carbon is good for plants, how can it possibly be pollution?”
The way the debate has developed is a bit mystifying to me.
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, there’s a legitimate argument to be had. That is, even assuming everything AGW advocates say is true, what do you propose as a corrective measure and where do we draw the line? How many billions of dollars of productivity get sacrificed to reduce carbon emissions? (there are also good economic counter arguments that failing to account for this is just shifting the costs forward, so don’t think I’m ignoring those, they’re just not important for the purposes of this post).
By the same token, what is it worth for us to do something if the Chinese never do anything?
The kind of policy you enact to try to remedy global warming and the extent of the policy are valid questions.
But they’ve been tossed by the wayside because of a bizarre arms race where both sides rapidly escalated to hyping the most catastrophic results possible versus insisting that the phenomenon itself doesn’t’ exist.
d cwilson
May 9, 2012 at 3:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And as recently as four years ago, that was where the debate lay. McCain and Palin campaigned on a cap and trade program to address AGW. Only after Obama tried to get that very solution through the Senate did both of them start calling it “cap and tax”.
Dennis N
May 9, 2012 at 3:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve seen 4 different stages of conservatives reacting to climate change, with all variants still alive but in varying amounts:
1) Climate change isn’t happening.
2) Climate change is happening by it’s natural (i.e. sun cycle).
3) Climate change is happening and it’s human caused but it’s nothing to worry about and trying to prevent it would harm the economy.
4) Climate change is happening and it’s human-caused and something to worry about but it’s too late to do anything.
You will notice that the only thing that stays consistent is the stance to protect corporations and the wealthy from any loss of money or privilege. Exactly like their stances on nearly every other issue.
Scientismist
May 9, 2012 at 6:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson: “..how evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics and that the only way it could possibly work is if there were an external source that was feeding a constant input of energy..”
fifthdentist: “..the answer is in plain sight.”
richardelguru: “They were presumably debating at night..”
Sorry, but someone has to say the obvious: I’m sure if they can just be patient, by morning the answer will dawn on them.
AGW is real, but can we afford to wait for the political dawn? Will it take the US South Coast going under at the end of the century?
Ouabache
May 9, 2012 at 8:33 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Windmills do not work that way! Goodnight!!!
democommie
May 10, 2012 at 7:28 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hey, they only DISCUSSED putting a wind farm in Mexico Bay (near the town in NY, not the country on the continent of Brazil) and it chased all of the snow away from the Tughill Plateua last winter! 1-leventy!!
Ed Brayton, spotlighting dumbfuckery since at least 2004.
stace
May 10, 2012 at 10:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
By standing there passively waiting to become fuel for forest fires, obviously.
slc1
May 10, 2012 at 10:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Dennis N @ #23
This is known as the Racehorse Haynes strategy, named after a famed Texas defense lawyer, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes.
heddle
May 10, 2012 at 11:05 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael Heath,
I don’t understand. In the first sentence you say it takes more denialism (for global warming and its cause, by which I reckon you mean AGW) and in the second you equate the denialism (“as idiotic’).
In any event, I disagree.
It is, of course, stupid to deny either, but the fossil record, genetics, genome mapping, etc provides a far more extensive data set than the ~150 years of weather data, the most important of which being much more recent.
This is not a denial of AGW– it is a statement that the error bars (and there are always error bars) are smaller for evolution (or, roughly, natural selection) than they are on global warming.
democommie
May 10, 2012 at 4:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
heddle:
Not to start an argument, but climate records go back quite a bit more than 150 years. Although much of the measurement equipment and technique for using that equipment IS relatively new in historical terms, there are written records going back several centuries and oodles of physical data available. The ice cores from Antartica and, sedimentary cores from lake bottoms and river beds and the like provide those who study AGW with good data from which they extrapolate.
You’re an astrophysicist, IIRC. A lot of astrophysics is still done by extrapolation from known/visible phenomena, yes? I think AGW has a lot more supporting data to validate it then evolution did in Darwin’s day.
heddle
May 10, 2012 at 4:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
democommie,
Fair enough. I was thinking about thinks like ocean temperature measurements and satellite data.. high precision measurements. These are relatively new and while extensive enough to confirm AGW are not (in my opinion) of the same quantity/quality as the fossil and genome data.
And while AGW has a lot more data than evolution had in Darwin’s day (arguably), it certainly does not have more data than evolution has today.
democommie
May 11, 2012 at 7:05 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
heddle:
Agreed.
slc1
May 11, 2012 at 7:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re democommie @ #30
Actually, Prof. Heddle is a nuclear physicist, AFAIK.
slc1
May 11, 2012 at 9:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Heddle & democommie
Although the data supporting global warming is less extensive then that supporting evolution and quantum mechanics for that matter, it’s a lot greater then the amount of data that supports General Relativity. For most of the 20th century, the evidence supporting General Relativity consisted of the anomalous precession rate of the orbit of the planet Mercury and the measurement of the deflection of light during total eclipses.
heddle
May 11, 2012 at 9:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
slc,
I think it is problematic to compare physics-based theories with life sciences or environmental sciences [1].
Yes, the magnitude (in bytes) of the measurement database for AGW and especially evolution dwarfs that for GR, in terms of precision the clear winner is GR–which has been tested to–what–one part in 10^5? Something like that.
It’s like comparing basketball players to football players–there is just no real way to do it that I can see.
_________________________
[1] Although ultimately, as we know, everything is physics.
slc1
May 11, 2012 at 4:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Re Heddle @ #34
Yes, the magnitude (in bytes) of the measurement database for AGW and especially evolution dwarfs that for GR, in terms of precision the clear winner is GR–which has been tested to–what–one part in 10^5?
That sounds about right. The problem with the calculations in gravitational problems is the value of the universal gravitational constant, G. I recall, although this was many years ago, that Dicke measured the value of G to 5 significant digits, which was an improvement of 2 significant digits over the previous measurements. I don’t know of anyone has been able to beat Dicke since that time.
This is to be contrasted with quantum electrodynamics in which the values of the electronic charge and the permittivity of the vacuum are known much more accurately.
democommie
May 11, 2012 at 10:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
heddle and slc1:
Okay, you’re gonna get all mathy–I’m going to the bar!