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> the fiery core of the Earth that's moving those plates around is an approximately 45 terawatt engine; human civilization is currently around 19 terawatts

Oh wow that is mind blowing! I would have thought we were at a smaller proportion, to be honest.

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If you want to feel small again, on the other end of things, 173,000 terawatts of sunlight hits the Earth. Earth's biosphere uses something like 1% of that (depending on your definition of "used", but whatever), so we have Earth's biosphere at something like 1700 terawatts, dwarfing both us and Earth's fiery core.

The energy of sunlight that hits the ocean is absorbed, and flows into the deep ocean. A smaller percentage of the energy that hits land is absorbed, but this rapidly radiated away at night.

Ok, one last one: global warming is basically that energy imbalance: the Earth is currently absorbing, on average, more energy from the sun than it radiates back, for a variety of reasons (change in atmospheric composition, change in surface reflectivity).

That energy imbalance amounts to 500 TW.

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