When the windbreaks were built on the plains during the depression it was designed to "break up" the windflow and effect the dustbowl conditions. The amount of wind that appears in the lowest 50,000 feet of the the atmosphere is in the GIGA Terrawatt range where the worlds energy needs are in the several terawatt range. I think that the stat was extracting 3-5% of the wind energy would satisfy world needs and certainly not effect weather or rotation of the Earth.
I like Gerald O'Neil's, (founder of National Space Society with Werner von Braun), to build large solar arrays to collect solar energy in space and beam the energy to the Earth using microwave beams. NASA has proved the microwave transmission now we just need to mine the moon make the solar collectors and "Beam me down Scotty"
I went to their forum once too...bunch of loons.
But if we collect energy from space and project it to earth, won't we just make global warming worse?
Didn't they just release a study that we were absorbing more energy than we were releasing? Wouldn't an outer-space collector just make that worse?
:->
In all seriousness though, we can't predict the weather. We can't predict climate change. So I am wary of any "prediction" that we could take even 1% out of the energy of the wind and not cause some unforseen catastrophe.
Nuclear Energy is the devil we know, and the devil we can manage.