“A hot object has greater average kinetic energy but may not have greater total kinetic energy “
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A lot of people in here are talking about bulk movement vs temperature, but the question as posed makes me think that you might be looking for an explanation of thermal energy vs temperature. So, what’s the thermal energy of an object? It’s the total amount of energy that contributes to temperature. To illustrate the difference, lets imagine 2 rocks. They’re made of the same stuff, but one is way bigger than the other. Now we do an experiment: we place each rock separately in highly insulated box and see what happens to the temperature of the system after a period of hours. After each trial, we reset the box to a standardized temperature. Whenever we do this, so long as the small rock is not MUCH hotter than the large rock, we will find that the large rock alters the temperature of the box more than the small rock does. This is because it takes more total energy to heat the large rock to the same temperature as the small rock.
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