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Comment by dwnwudp | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Elect...

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.

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.

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

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