It’s the sun, silly. More heat comes from the Sun everyday, even when it’s cloudy than it’s possible for people to make. More and more sun energy each and every minute of each hour of each day. That’s a lot of heat. Gazillions of mega-joules every second. Global warming comes from the heat of the sun.

About 1.74 x 1017 watts of energy from the sun strikes the earth. (ie: 174,000,000,000,000,000, or 174 quadrillion watts).

If there are no clouds in the way, then one square meter of the earth will receive about one kilowatt of that energy. So for the six hours in the middle of a sunny day, an area the size of a small backyard swimming pool (48 m2) will receive about 288 kilowatts of energy. That’s nearly 10 times what the average US household uses in an entire day! (In the United States, the average daily electricity use is around 30 kilowatt hours per household).

The average US house is 2,467 sq feet. The sun provides .5574 kw per square foot. So each 6 hours of sun provide 1,375 kw which is 46 times more energy than the house uses. Remember that next time you try to argue that people cause the earth to get hotter.

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