[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

If all windmills on earth are designed to catch only eastward wind,  while westward wind can blow freely,  will it accelerate earth rotation?

[Halc]

If all windmills on earth are designed to catch only eastward wind,  while westward wind can blow freely,  will it accelerate earth rotation?

By conservation of angular momentum, all you need is one windmill with a vertical axis at the north pole, rotating against Earth's spin.  Yes, any torque applied to Earth's crust is going to alter its rotation, transferring its angular momentum to something else.  So my farting in your general direction is enough.  One windmill, even a toy one, is enough.  Of course it will resume its original spin as soon as the windmill stops, so it's temporary. All effects are still temporary, and vanish once the thing to which the angular momentum was transferred gives that momentum back. It's more difficult to permanently change it.

That said, there's no way all the windmills applying eastward torque on Earth is going to actually out-torque the westward forces acting on Earth such as the tides.  The Earth's spin will not actually increase *, but will rather slow its spin at a slightly lower pace. It would spin faster only relative to what it would have without the windmills, not faster than it was moving an hour ago.

* The Earth's spin doesn't decrease steadily in the short term. There are fairly short intervals when it increases, so if the windmill thingy was done during one of those intervals, it would temporarily increase the spin above the natural increase.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

That said, there's no way all the windmills applying eastward torque on Earth is going to actually out-torque the westward forces acting on Earth such as the tides. 

That depends on how many windmills/how much power is generated.
The atmosphere can have different angular speed than Earth's crust. So it's possible to increase earth crust's angular momentum eastward while decreasing atmosphere's total angular momentum. Besides, earth is not a completely isolated system. It interacts with its surrounding, such as solar wind.

[Bored chemist]

climbing the stairs increases your distance from the rotation axis, so it increases the moment of inertia and this reduces teh rotational speed, but not much.

will it accelerate earth rotation?

No
To do that you have to have something outside the Earth to push against.
The atmosphere is part of the Earth

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

climbing the stairs increases your distance from the rotation axis, so it increases the moment of inertia and this reduces teh rotational speed, but not much.

will it accelerate earth rotation?

No
To do that you have to have something outside the Earth to push against.
The atmosphere is part of the Earth

afaik,  molecules in upper atmosphere collide with solar wind.   they also occasionally collide with meteors.

[Bored chemist]

climbing the stairs increases your distance from the rotation axis, so it increases the moment of inertia and this reduces teh rotational speed, but not much.

will it accelerate earth rotation?

No
To do that you have to have something outside the Earth to push against.
The atmosphere is part of the Earth

afaik,  molecules in upper atmosphere collide with solar wind.   they also occasionally collide with meteors.

Let me know when someone builds a wind turbine that tall.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Let me know when someone builds a wind turbine that tall.

The wind turbines don't have to catch the solar wind directly. They are built in lower atmosphere as usual. If they only catch eastward wind, then there would be overall net westward wind in the atmosphere, relative to the earth crust. Assuming that solar wind and meteors don't have preference on particular earth rotational direction, they are expected to oppose the net westward wind produced by the wind turbines.

[Bored chemist]

the net westward wind produced by the wind turbines.

https://xkcd.com/1378/

[CPT ArkAngel]

In my opinion, you can only transfer some momentum if the solar win has a net effect on the net wind direction of rotation and it will depend where you put your windmill. Tides also.

[Bored chemist]

I guess you could pretend that the world is one of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crookes_radiometer
But fundamentally the winds are driven by the Sun.

[CPT ArkAngel]

In a meteorological course, I remember to have predicted a counter wind at very high altitude to compensate for the wind we are usually seeing for the weather and airplane flights. I told myself the wind directions are due to the coriolis force, evaporation, convection, pressure, temperature and terrain friction. I told myself the solar wind should be negligible. Everybody was skeptic. One day we saw the wind of the upper atmosphere in realtime on a meteorological site and there it was, a uniform thin layer going all in the opposite direction of the general direction of the lower atmosphere.

The solar wind has not a big effect on the net rotation of the earth's wind.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

the net westward wind produced by the wind turbines.

https://xkcd.com/1378/

That's funny, but it doesn't represent the idea proposed in this thread.
Consider this spinning globe.

The spherical glass prevents external forces from directly affect rotation of inner ball, which is floating in a fluid.
If I add a small impeller on the equator, anchored to the inner ball, directed westward and turn it on, the fluid will rotate westward. Due to conservation of angular momentum, the inner ball will rotate eastward faster.

[Bored chemist]

but it doesn't represent the idea proposed in this thread.

Did you read what you actually said?
" wind produced by the wind turbines."
Wind turbines do not produce wind.
They are not fans.
The cartoon depicts exactly the mistake you have made.
And also

Due to conservation of angular momentum, the inner ball will rotate eastward faster. system as a whole will not rotate.

Fixed it for you.

[Petrochemicals]

the net westward wind produced by the wind turbines.

https://xkcd.com/1378/

That's funny, but it doesn't represent the idea proposed in this thread.
Consider this spinning globe.

The spherical glass prevents external forces from directly affect rotation of inner ball, which is floating in a fluid.
If I add a small impeller on the equator, anchored to the inner ball, directed westward and turn it on, the fluid will rotate westward. Due to conservation of angular momentum, the inner ball will rotate eastward faster.

Your theory is suggesting that the wind blows without impedance if windmills are not present, it also suggests (although I stand to be corrected, if you would clarify please)they do not originate from temperature differences but in the earths rotation.

Subtract wind from the waves and trees and hills and etc and add the energy to the windmill base, both at the same direction of action you have an equal vector ! You seem to wish to know where the energy is coming from for the electric ?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Your theory is suggesting that the wind blows without impedance if windmills are not present, it also suggests (although I stand to be corrected, if you would clarify please)they do not originate from temperature differences but in the earths rotation.

No. I assumed that without windmill, the overall restrictions on the wind are balanced between westward and eastward direction, thus they don't have net effect on earth rotation. The homogenously directed windmills create the imbalance which makes the crust of the earth rotates faster eastward.

[Bored chemist]

Your theory is suggesting that the wind blows without impedance if windmills are not present, it also suggests (although I stand to be corrected, if you would clarify please)they do not originate from temperature differences but in the earths rotation.

No. I assumed that without windmill, the overall restrictions on the wind are balanced between westward and eastward direction, thus they don't have net effect on earth rotation. The homogenously directed windmills create the imbalance which makes the crust of the earth rotates faster eastward.

A windmill adds a nearly balanced pair of forces
The air pushes on it, but, by slowing that air down, it ensues that the air pushes less hard on the Earth.

[Petrochemicals]

Your theory is suggesting that the wind blows without impedance if windmills are not present, it also suggests (although I stand to be corrected, if you would clarify please)they do not originate from temperature differences but in the earths rotation.

No. I assumed that without windmill, the overall restrictions on the wind are balanced between westward and eastward direction, thus they don't have net effect on earth rotation. The homogenously directed windmills create the imbalance which makes the crust of the earth rotates faster eastward.

If the wind energy inpacts the earth it has an effect, both wind directions with a residual exess in one direction. If it counteracts other opposite airflow  its dissipated in one way or another, with the same residual exess. The net force is the same. The energy that is extracted to generate the electric is the atmospheric energy of freeflowing winds, water vapour(quite a major ammount) pressure atmospheric expantion.

If you collected all of the energy from the sun a la permanent eclipse across the whole planet and did not release it to the planet the atmosphere would shrink, the water would drop from the air, so windmills will sort of do a similar thing, but  only if the energy is not released into the atmosphere, such as endothermic industrial processes.

[Bored chemist]

Are  there any large scale industrial endothermic processes driven by windmills?

Your theory is suggesting that the wind blows without impedance if windmills are not present, it also suggests (although I stand to be corrected, if you would clarify please)they do not originate from temperature differences but in the earths rotation.

No. I assumed that without windmill, the overall restrictions on the wind are balanced between westward and eastward direction, thus they don't have net effect on earth rotation. The homogenously directed windmills create the imbalance which makes the crust of the earth rotates faster eastward.

If the wind energy inpacts the earth it has an effect, both wind directions with a residual exess in one direction. If it counteracts other opposite airflow  its dissipated in one way or another, with the same residual exess. The net force is the same. The energy that is extracted to generate the electric is the atmospheric energy of freeflowing winds, water vapour(quite a major ammount) pressure atmospheric expantion.

If you collected all of the energy from the sun a la permanent eclipse across the whole planet and did not release it to the planet the atmosphere would shrink, the water would drop from the air, so windmills will sort of do a similar thing, but  only if the energy is not released into the atmosphere, such as endothermic industrial processes.

Are  there any large scale industrial endothermic processes driven by windmills?

[David Cooper]

If you have a satellite that's rotating slightly, you can presumably stop that using the gyroscopes, but only at the cost of having to run them continually. To stop the rotation so that you don't have to run motors all the time, you'd need to use gas jets, and that gas has to be lost to space in order for it to become external torque.

With the Earth and its atmosphere, there may be some gas escaping (hydrogen and helium in particular), and that escaping gas may have a component of movement passed to it by a movement of the atmosphere acting more eastward than westward or the reverse, so that could translate to external torque, but it would be an infinitesimal amount. More of this may happen near the poles where I'm guessing the solar wind is stronger (on the basis that that's where aurorae happen), so the prevailing direction of the wind in those regions could have some relevance to this. But there will be so little of this happening as to be irrelevant to any measurable change in rotation speed of the Earth. Some of the variation may be due to movement of material in the core which we know moves around as the magnetic poles wander about. Some of the variation will be due to ice melting on land: as sea level rises, you have more mass away from the poles and that will slow the Earth's rotation just like the ice skater moving his/her arms further out from the axis of rotation. The pressure distribution of the air around the planet due to temperature differences will also cause variation in the same way by varying how much weight of gas is at different distances out from the axis of rotation, and the same kind of variation applies to the distribution of water in the atmosphere.

[Petrochemicals]

≥

If you have a satellite that's rotating slightly, you can presumably stop that using the gyroscopes, but only at the cost of having to run them continually. To stop the rotation so that you don't have to run motors all the time, you'd need to use gas jets, and that gas has to be lost to space in order for it to become external torque.

David, as I discovered along time ago that in the long term the only way to affect the earths ;

position in space
Orbital speed
Moon
Tides
Etc


Is you

have to exeed the maximum surface escape velocity of the earth moon system

Otherwise it is like the tides, it flows one way then the other. The maximum escape velocity from the surface is 11kms at surface level (very thick atmosphere) . I am not sure but i believe even h bombs did not long term affect us, 11kms 11,000m/s  is faster than anything exept rail guns, which are not very big at all, and mass wise tiny.