Why is it colder at higher altitudes despite being closer to the sun?
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1. The ~5 miles closer to the Sun you can get by by boarding a commercial jet or climbing the world’s tallest mountain is totally negligible compared to the *93 million* miles between the Earth and the Sun.
2. The energy that the Earth receives from the Sun travels through the vacuum of space as light, which mostly passes straight through the atmosphere. It only turns to heat when it hits the ground and is absorbed. From there, the lowest layer of the atmosphere is headed via direct contact with the warm ground. As fast-moving air molecules move up and away from the surface, gravity acts against them to slow them down, sapping their energy, and they also radiate away their heat energy as infrared light, some of which escapes into space forever.
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