Currently I read this excerpt on a school power point that stated the following:
" The sun is closer to the equator than the poles. Therefore the sun’s rays have less distance to travel to the equator. The further the rays have to travel the more energy (heat) they lose. Therefore the sun’s rays at the equator have more energy (heat) than the rays at the poles. "
It doesn't seem to make any logical sense to me how the sun's rays loose energy with distance. Is that excerpt correct?
The quote is rather badly incorrect. Sure, the sun is a few thousand kilometres closer to a point on the equator at noon than to the Earth's core or poles, but 12 hours later the point will be an equal distance further away. That distance change is just 2/23455=0.000085 of Earth's distance from the sun.
Sunlight does not lose energy with distance, but it gets spread out. The light that leaves the sun's surface at a given moment will reach Earth orbit 8 minutes later, but now are spread out across a vast surface ($4\pi r^2=2.8\cdot 10^{23}$ m$^2$, or 46,178 times the sun's surface). That makes it less intense.
The real reason the equator is hotter is that the sunlight hits the ground relatively straight compared to the more glancing impact at higher and lower latitude: if you imagine a square sunbeam hitting the Earth, near the poles all the energy in the beam get spread out across a vast area, while at the equator it just hits straight. (During a day the intensity varies from zero to max, but the maximum is highest at noon at the equator).
