>how does the size of the earth matter? Because we are but a mote of dust in a tiny span of time. The earth has such a tremendous amount of volume that it's im

>how does the size of the earth matter? Because we are but a mote of dust in a tiny span of time. The earth has such a tremendous amount of volume that it's impossible for us to change it any significant amount. Look at global warming, We've been dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year for the last century. Even with all of the immensity of human activity we've changed the temperature of the atmosphere by less than a degree. Even that tiny temperature change from global warming is pretty much entirely from the release of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses and not the release of energy. The atmosphere is also just a tiny thin wisp of a shell around the planet. The amount of thermal energy we could ever hope to extract from the planet is too small to be considered a rounding error.