edit: during its exploitation
I was involved in design of Wind Farms and they affect wind directions at least locally. Naturally, they change climate locally. The question is how local is not global enough.
Review paper (2015):
'Impact of wind-energy generation on climate: A rising spectre'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
'Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale windfarms'
https://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.short#sec-2
'Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale windfarms'
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/2053/2010/acp-10-2053-201...
edit: There's more!
'Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation'
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-0024...
'Climate Impacts of Large-Scale Wind Farms as Parameterized in a Global Climate Model '
However, the consequences from each technology should still be debatable, and are an interesting question in itself I think. The problems start when questions become political - what are the implications? In the hard sciences we usually don't concern ourselves with that unless we have to, but when discussing sensitive research topics in public one has to be more careful since many people tend to deduce intentions where there were none. (I need to remind myself frequently.) I think your post fell victim to that.
My post raised a question and wasn't based on the papers you mentioned but based on what I was told by wind farm engineers (e.g., that many farms are not green positive when accounting for everything even when accounting for futures years of exploitation). After working in academia for years, I believe that there is a much higher likelihood of a paper being rejected if it shows that large wind farms harm local environment. It is basically $1T of interests and "green-greeen!" people against people who will figure out what happens only years later.
Edit: Link 1: https://www.windpowerengineering.com/two-reasons-why-gearbox... Link 2: https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/investigation-launched-hy... Link 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-12/wind-powe...
Obviously we should fix a problem here if there is one, but the fact that we're discussing it in the context of larger scale issues is absurd.
The majority of the savings will come from offsetting carbon emitting sources of power.
I realize that this is a very simplistic view, but if I am wrong I would love to learn something.
Any quantity influencing this balance could theoretically be used to get back to the old point.
The discussed options are either solar radiation management which lowers the amount of incoming radiation or carbon capture which would allow more outgoing thermal radiation to escape.
The first option has ideas such as stratospheric sulfur injections (increasing albedo leading to more reflected incoming sunlight), deploying a sunscreen in space or simply painting areas white. (It should be noted that humanity has been causing albedo changes for a long time simply by changing land cover. Forests have lower albedo than fields, for example.) The problem with the ideas is that they are very unstable. Many need constant renewal and management to be kept active. There are also side effects apparent in the model such as changed atmospheric circulation patterns for some of them, and the ocean acidification due to dissolved CO2 etc are not addressed either.
The second option, carbon capture, can be achieved by different means. Basically, carbon needs to be stored in one of the sinks available. The natural sinks are the biosphere (quite small, but increasing it will help) and chemical weathering. If we wait long enough, chemical weathering will lower the CO2 concentrations sufficiently. [0] So one of the ideas here is to increase the speed of the weathering by increasing the surface and availability of the the stone to weather. Others are increasing the biomass sink by planting more of it or fertilizing the oceans so the algae can grow faster and take a part to the ocean floors.
Then there is technical carbon sequestration, which needs energy input (you're talking about this, right?). Where the energy comes from shouldn't matter as long as the carbon emission is smaller than the sequestration. I guess all renewable energies and nuclear should work fine. (Maybe there will be a better technology at some point in the future as well, but better not rely on it.)
However, now this carbon needs to be stored, which is a problem in itself. Ideas are simply pumping it into the ground, for example depleted natural gas fields (unstable!) or changing it to other forms which needs more energy. (Any energy that can be changed to chemical energy is actually removed from the system, but that will probably not be very much. I'd have to check up on this though, I've found my intuition is not that good yet for these numbers.) There is not a lot of money in it yet, which makes research slow. This is still most probably our best shot.
All but one scenarios of the IPCC-1.5°C report have carbon sequestration from 2030 - in 10 years - (in the worst case on the order of half of current emissions!), and the one that doesn't uses biomass capture. We cannot reach a path of <= 1.5°C warming without it. [1]
[0] https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
This is a pretty naive question but: will capturing that energy for human use divert it from other parts of the current ("natural") system where it's being used?
Habitat destruction from these new technologies: no idea...