The climate-change, wind turbine boys will do absolutely anything to promote their ridiculous, inefficient, high-maintenance product. Comes the latest laugher:
“Offshore wind turbines could weaken hurricanes, reduce storm surge.”
Ten thousand of them, to be exact. Not in the Gulf, please. We don’t need thousands of giant turbine blades flying this far inland after a Cat 5 rips into the windmills.
Via Instapundit.
UPDATE: Now that fracking has slain the peak-oil dragon, windmills are facing decreasing government subsidies across the USA and Europe so the prospect of ten thousand “to weaken hurricanes, reduce storm surge” is nil.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
More years ago than I like to think, there were some power generating windmills set up on the beach in Surfside. They were a landmark used by the bad crowd (in which I include myself and my rowdy friends) as the first beach access road after the Village of Surfside – so the law was county boys, and very few of them. Wild things happened down that way, toward San Luis Pass but before the next group of beach houses.
The windmills didn’t function long. Salt water ate them up. Shortly before they were completely removed, there were just a couple of forlorn blades dangling from the hubs. Surfside now has engulfed the wild beach, with encroachment from the Pass side, too.
Of course you’re right, the salt water would eat up their stupid windmills. The West Texas sand & wind haven’t been too kind to the ones out there, either. They’re just a boondoggle for the builders and owners and the pols who give them the tax money.
“weaken hurricanes”? What an idea. One might as well place thousands of engineers on the beach flapping their hands to ward off tornadoes…
Funny you should mention tornadoes. I have a post about that in the works, along similar lines as this one..
There are lots of engineers who could use the extra cash for the hand-flapping, Snoopy. And they’d do less harm than trying to run a research project. Do an ROI and the hand-flapping would probably turn out to be the best option for a hell of a lot of engineers.