Even more deadly. The Sun is about 150 million km away, but at the speed of light sunlight travels only 8.5 minutes to reach the Earth. This amount of energy is known as solar constant. The rest of UV and shorter waves are scattered by the atmosphere. Earth is also emitting energy in the form of radiation.
Earth emits less energy than it receives from insolation.
Transformations of energy in the geosphere Radiation is not the only form of energy present in the geosphere. Part of insolation gets converted to other forms of energy. Before we can talk about the global energy balance, we need to take a look at the transformations that these flows of energy undergo in the geosphere. Reflection Reflection does not change the object or the wave, just redirects the wave Angle of reflection equals angle of incidence Scattering - reflection in many directions. The shorter the wave, the more it is scattered - selective scattering .