Doi.org/10.1038/s41561-017-0029-9

Target Article

Karnauskas, K.B., Lundquist, J.K., Zhang, L., (2017). Southward shift of the global wind energy resource under high carbon dioxide emissions. Nature Geoscience.11, 38-43. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-017-0029-9 doi: 10.1038/s41561-017-0029-9.

Significant Claim

This article provides calculations of changes in wind power across the globe; both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have been assessed regarding regional variations of wind power. An ensemble of ten fully coupled global climate models has been taken into account in this wind power analysis. Outputs from this ensemble were used with an industry wind turbine power curve, and this analysis considered future scenarios of high and low emission of CO2. Results from this article revealed substantial regional variations of wind power across both hemispheres, with a decrease in wind power at mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, and an increase across the tropics and Southern Hemisphere. Additional findings have also been provided, which may also be compromised due to significant caveats in this manuscript, to be explained below.

Possible caveat with this article

In this article, the authors provide projections of wind energy for high and low emission scenarios across the globe using monthly field outputs of 10 GCM models (Chang et al., 2012). Unfortunately, the GCM historical simulations were on a monthly time-scale, and winds vary at sub-hourly time-scales. The authors claim their GCM simulations are able to reproduce sub-monthly wind variability. Furthermore, their global analysis was validated against a unique wind station in the middle of the United States of America (Colorado, USA), and results were then stated to be valid across the globe. Accepting the validity of these results concerning various states of the USA, and even of various countries worldwide. The original 1988 mandate for the IPCC highlights that any climate change signal has to be distinguished from any systematic uncertainty. No confidence is provided by the projections used in this article, as totally different metrics of model performance would have been obtained within other regions across the world where winds present a totally different spatial and temporal variability. The results presented in this manuscript are hence extremely limited, and provide no confidence that the potential changes in future wind energy (relative to the historical) arise from the anthropocentric climate forcing, or from the systematic uncertainty in the GCM models such as uncertainties lying under various parametrizations concerning physical process, and issues concerning numerical schemes and space-time resolutions. Concluding, there are far from negligible shortcomings which give both the results and conclusions of this article may be a significant potential source of misinformation, which may prompt errors in future publications relying upon its “scientific findings”.

Comments

In WL-Letters you have the freedom to respond to any caveat that may be inaccurate.
-- Andutta (talk) 18:12, 6 July 2022 (UTC)