Fluffeh writes:
"At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, spoke in a session on renewable energy.
Jacobson was invited to speak at the conference because he has developed a roadmap to convert the entire U.S. to renewable energy using primarily wind, water, and solar generated energy. His detailed analysis includes looking at costs and benefits on a per-state basis, including the obvious benefits to human health from reduced pollution. One of his slides showed a very unexpected benefit, however: taming of destructive hurricanes with the help of offshore wind farms.
Jakobson's study, co-authored by Cristina L. Archer and Willett Kempton, has been published in Nature Climate Change (full text available here)."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by monster on Friday February 28 2014, @10:07AM
Add to this that such reduction in wind energy would also cause at least a change in rain patterns (if the wind is not strong enough, clouds may not travel too inland before raining, like in Australia) leading to droughs in some places. Not saying that it couldn't happen because of other causes (climate is dynamic, after all) but doing it on purpose...