Not really a good day for the greenies today. Turns out one of their favorite forms of “clean” energy — as long as the required machinery is in someone else’s backyard — may be adding to their huge bugaboo, “global warming.”

Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power.

Okay, I’ll admit it does seem counter-intuitive that wind farms would cause warming, but if you unpack it a little, it actually starts to make sense:

Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.

“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.

“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.

I think I hear the sound of greenies’ heads exploding as they try to wrap their minds around the concept of their blessed wind farms actually contributing to what they claim is one of the worst problems facing the planet today.