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By Doug Peeples

SGN News Editor

Do wind farms cause global warming? The short answer is no. But you wouldn't know that from reading several media interpretations (or misinterpretations) of a short study published recently by a University of Albany scientist that appeared in Nature Climate Change.

Yes, author Liming Zhou and the scientists working with him did find a warming trend in the area based on satellite data compiled from 2003 to 2011, particularly at night, and did attribute the warming to wind farms. He found that surface temperatures warmed when the turbines drew warmer air higher in the atmosphere closer to the ground.

So, is it a big deal? Zhou doesn't seem to think so. In a Q&A related to the study, Zhou said "Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only redistribute the air’s heat near the surface (the turbine itself does not generate any heat), which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases due to the burning of fossil fuels."

The story that ran under the Fox News headline summarized the study and Zhou's findings that wind farms did increase temperatures, but stopped there. Not a word about any of Zhou's other observations, such as those quoted above. Instead, it said Zhou's research is "casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power." A wild exaggeration to say the least, but several media outlets took the ball and ran with it.

Interesting that in a Washington Post article criticizing how Fox handled the story, author Brad Plumer points out that Florida orange growers frequently use large fans to pull warm air to the ground to protect their groves from frost – using principles a lot like those cited in the study. And we don't recall anyone accusing orange groves of causing global warming. As the Post story succinctly put it, moving warm air around in a small area is completely different from global warming that occurs when carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere, trapping heat that would otherwise dissipate.

Nice to see some balanced journalism, particularly when it's compared to stories that, well, aren't. To be fair, other media accounts gave balanced accounts of the story, too – they just didn't seem to get the same amount of attention as the less objective versions.