There were indeed the usual disasters —hurricanes, wildfires, drought, but I wasn’t expecting this little twist when listening to this NPR story on rising Arctic temperatures:
Scientists say they can’t attribute any particular drought or hurricane to changes in the Arctic. But computer simulations show changes.
For example: wind. “We’re talking about a reduction of wind power all the way across the Northern Hemisphere, midlatitude,” says Kristopher Karnauskas, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, he says average wind speed could drop significantly over the next 80 years. That could put a damper on wind energy.
“For example,” he says, “in the central United States, the models are predicting somewhere between 10 and 40 percent reduction compared to present-day amount of wind power.” A day that is on the low end of windy would, on average, become the norm.
So we use wind power to combat the rising Arctic temperatures that are causing the reduction in wind power….
