The links between energy use and the global warming of the atmosphere are significant. In 2011, the global total output of CO2 from energy production was 32,579,000,000 metric tons (32.6 Gigatons) or 71,824,400,397,211 pounds. That is just for one year, for energy consumption alone.
First, read Chapter 1 of the IPCC report on Renewable Energy (RE) and climate change.
This is a rather complex document with a significant amount of data and figures, and it is sometimes easy to lose the thread of the argument. This document expects you to already know something about how climate change works. For a quick background on how the greenhouse effect works, please have a look at HyperPhysics [1] and University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) [2].
In Chapter 1 of the IPCC RE Report: