Wind Power influence on the Global Climate

In a report published in the Nov. 16th issue [PDF] of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, David Keith, et al, took a look at the large-scale impact of wind farms on the global climate. In simulations, using enough windmills to generate all the world's power needs, of around 2 terawatts, the local and global climate would be impacted. Wind farms would "extract kinetic energy" from the climate -- create surface drag -- "altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer." But that's not necessarily bad. The alteration of circulation would not change global-mean surface temperature, but would succed in increasing the equatorial temperature and lower the polar temperature -- not a bad thing, considering that CO₂ related global warming is melting the polar regions today and slowly changing the global climate. Of course, the additional benefit of using wind power is the lowering of dependency on fossil fuels that pump CO₂ into the atmosphere. Neat!