Question

The Student Text states that “there is a continuous input of energy to Earth from the sun.” Recently, Ontario suffered an “energy shortage” during a hot summer. Give scientific reasons to explain how there can be an energy shortage when there is an unlimited supply of energy from the sun. How might an energy shortage be reduced in the future?

Answer 1

The heat amount energy from sun to earth may differ on the effect of sun angle or climate.The angle at which sunlight strikes earth varies by location,time,season due to earth orbit around the sun and sun rotation etc.

Seasonal change in the angle of sunlight,caused by the tilt of earth axis.

Now we can discuss what the reason for the shortage of energy in summer

when the sunlight on earth at a lower angle (closer to horizon) then the energy of sunlight is spread for a large area.

And the sun sunlight become at more angle to the earth then the light spreaded area become less. So the energy to the earth concentrated on a particular area and the total energy of earth may become less.

And also depend the landscape feature . That is the sun energy directly trapped by the plants.This is the primary energy for all other living species on earth.

In winter season the plants will grow with maximum potential when compare to summer,because it’s the good favourable climatic condition for plant cultivation.

And in summer the plants may have dried or dead condition so the property of trapping energy from sun may decrease on globally. So the net amount of energy become decrease.

To overcome this situation we want cultivate more number of plants globally etc...