> We aren't really in any kind of a place to grasp the enormity of the numbers. Numbers that big really do become meaningless.

If that's true, that's all the more reason not to comment.

You're saying we can't grasp the numbers, but apparently you think you can grasp them well enough to conclude that humans won't have a significant effect.

If we really can't grasp the numbers, then the only conclusion we can come to is that we don't know. I think "I don't know" is something that we need to say more often if we're being honest with ourselves.

> For instance, in BTUs, about 80 million british quads of the energy that the sun gives earth will make it to the surface in a year. (I know the sun delivers more than 80 million british quads, but I'm not counting the 30% that gets reflected). Now I'll be nice, and say an additional 10-20% of that is absorbed by biomass. (It's not, it's way closer to 10%, but I'm being nice.) And an average American home uses what? say 50 million BTUs a year, (About 12 - 15 thousand kWh), if they're being profligate?

> So the wind is coming from the interplay of the solar energy absorbed by different areas of the ocean and different areas on land. (Another caveat, our atmosphere can trap some of the energy, which will add to new energy sent by the sun, and kind of spiral in that fashion. This is what happened to Venus, which is why they have like 500 mile an hour winds there.) In any case, ignoring the climate warming, we'd have to find some way to harness enough wind to make an impact against, say, 20 million british quads of BTUs.

Back-of-napkin math is pretty unconvincing. For example, you made no mathematical connection whatsoever between the energy from the sun numbers you were throwing around, and the amount of that that gets converted into wind energy. You said that 80 million quads of energy hit's the earth from the sun, so your "20 million British quads of BTUs" is arbitrarily choosing to say that 1/4 of the sun's energy is converted to wind?

So let's sanity check that. quads is a unit of energy E, and E = 1/2 x m x v^2

Now let's convert our numbers into reasonable units and plug them into the equation. 20 million quads = 2 x 10^7 quads. 1 quad = 1.055 x 10^18 joules[1], so that's 2.11 x 10^25 joules. The mass of the earth's atmosphere is 5.15 x 10^18 kg[2]. Plugging these numbers into E and m in the equation, we get:

E = 1/2 x m x v^2
2.11 x 10^25 = 1 / 2 x 5.15 x 10^18 x v^2
2.11 x 10^7 = 1 / 2 x 5.15 x v^2
4.22 x 10^7 = 5.15 x v^2
2.1733 x 10^8 = v^2
14700 = v

Just to be clear, joules is kg x m^2 / s^2 and our mass was in kg, so this velocity is 14700 m/s. You guessed that 20 million quads of the sun's energy was being converted into wind, but if that were true, the average velocity of the earth's atmosphere would be 14700 m/s. To be clear, that's the average velocity, and we know that wind isn't uniform throughout the atmosphere, so some parts would be faster. For comparison, the speed of sound in air is 343 m/s.

So yeah, the numbers you are using are incomprehensibly large because they are wrong, wrong, wrong by a few orders of magnitude.

To be clear, this isn't a criticism of wind power. It's obvious that the clear and present danger of global warming is a much more pressing concern than unknown effects of wind power. It's a criticism of people answering questions they don't know anything about.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth