Hehe nice. I had a look, and yes, we seem to be on a similar line of enquiry. All credit to you, since you came on to that not only earlier than me, but from maybe a less technical background. I was only just starting to see the opening of the rabbit-hole, during related PhD work, about the time you wrote your story.

A thought for you; it seems to me that if the cricket activity was entirely powered by solar, the net effect on heat generated would be the opposite of what it is whilst powered from energy extracted from Earth. This is because we would be converting the bulk of Joules received to things other than heat, so the net result on Earth would be reduction of heat.

Same thing goes for all solar energy use, the more of it we can put to use from the sun, the less heat we generate by our activities. This works out mathematically when we consider Earth is just a kind of battery, the positive charging source is at the input from the sun, and everywhere we take it out, the energy is negative - it all adds up.

One of the most frustrating and senseless counter arguments to this being the truth, is folk who know nothing about thermodynamics, arguing that this does not follow the law of entropy.

They are wrong on two counts, firstly thermodynamics can only be applied meaningfully to closed systems, whereas the system of Earth and sun is not closed, it is open, the energy coming into it from the sun is something that can't be quantified as a constant, it has to be an endless function of time, for our practical purposes, therefore the system is not closed.

Secondly the process of entropy is absolutely reversible, whereas they talk about it as if it isn't, nature is busy reversing entropy all the time, by creating life, which is not entropic, but the reverse of entropy. Hey-ho, they will believe what they want to believe, until we, allied with nature, and now also Ai, hit them over the head with it :)