Wind Science is Fake?
This week in the comments, a climate change denier seems to claim that “wind science” is fake. I’m not sure what they mean by “wind science” but they don’t think that thermodynamics works in the case of wind. They want me to create a city that only has high pressure and put that city opposite of a low-pressure city. This is so you can test if wind is produced between the two cities. That’s not how anything works. You can’t create a city that has only high pressure or low pressure.
Basics of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics relates heat and temperature to work or energy. The first law of thermodymaics states that energy that flows into or out of a system will follow the law of conservation of energy. That means that the energy isn’t created nor destroyed but converted into different forms of energy. The second law of thermodymanics states that entropy increases as this energy is converted into different forms. The third law says that that closed systems entropy will increase till it reaches absolute zero.
Thermodymanics was given its first real definition by Lord Kelvin in 1854. He stated:
Thermo-dynamics is the subject of the relation of heat to forces acting between contiguous parts of bodies, and the relation of heat to electrical agency.
The initial use of thermodynamics was to study mechanical heat engines but quickly moved to the study of chemical compounds and reactions. This subject has become applicable to many science and engineering fields, including meterology.
How Wind Works
Oddly enough, Wind is considered a form of solar energy. This is due to the Sun unevenly heating the surface of the earth due to terrain differences, the tilt of the earth, and the earth’s rotation. Wind is air moving through the atmosphere. The two primary components of wind are speed and direction. As the sun warms the atmosphere, some portions of the globe get warmer than others. This results in an imbalance in pressure. Warmer air is less dense and rises. Colder air then rushes in to fill in the low pressure area. This movement of air is what we call wind.
As we learned earlier, this process is a thermodynamic one.
