It's very unclear to me that removing heat from the ground, reducing wind speed/pressure, and lowering tidal forces is guaranteed to never have catastrophic impact.
They do the same exact thing in terms of 'slowing wind down' and 'preventing the sun's energy from reaching the ground'.
This idea is understandable, but it falls apart for the same reason the wind turbine bird death concern does (the number of birds that have died due to humans liking windows is 1,000,000x the number that have died in turbines).
To a lesser extent, yes. However, power generating facilities are different in that they are intended to remove as much energy as possible, whereas sky scrapers etc are not.
But if it makes you feel better, all man made structures combined cover a small fraction of the earths surface people tend to be in areas with other people and thus it looks like we’re doing more than we are. NYC for example has 291x the average population density of the rest of the US and that’s including over a square mile devoted to Central Park.
Agriculture has a bigger impact because it cover so much land, but that’s offset by it being relatively close to nature.
I get your point, but a 1,000x+ difference in quantity cannot be ignored.
But like the other comment said, with solar you are not taking anything.
But solar panels do heat up the air around them more than vegetation would do.
See also, "Agrivoltaics."
Solar is just transforming light into electricity, i don’t think it’s removing any heat from the system unfortunately, unlike radiative cooling paint.
Now that we should be painting any tropical building we can with.
You're not removing anything, you're just transforming kinetic energy into electrical energy. Energy transforms, everything transforms on earth, as per the laws of physics. When you die, your body doesn't get "removed", it gets transformed into worm food. It's the cycle of matter and energy. "Yeah science Mr. White!"
I doubt human devices that capture wind and water wave energy are enough to negatively impact the climate in a meaningful way, considering how powerful nature is.
Covering the ground in non transparent panels removes heat from the ground.
The side effects of solar panels is indeed a cooler ground underneath. Plants have difficulty growing in the shade.
Panels have a darker shade than most ground they are covering, so they might actually absorb more heat than the typical ground they are covering. They are distorting the local albedo.
I think for geocooling by solar panels shade, the effect is completely local and only surface deep. After all stone/ground is an insulator, and geothermal energy is considered renewable.
That's the second law, now you know what's up
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game
Cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame"
-MC Hawking
Exactly what we used to say about industrial gas emissions.
We all need to live with some calculated risks.
.. compared to taking energy and carbon from the ground, and changing the atmospheric composition enough to significantly change the temperature? Because that's the alternative to not-renewables.