Dr Robert A Phillip thank you for your contribution to the discussion

I believe that it might seem logical to think that temperatures would rise when Earth is closest to the sun. In reality, Earth is at its coolest at perihelion! That's because rocks heat up much more quickly than water. Most of the landmass on Earth is in the Northern Hemisphere, and most of the Southern Hemisphere is ocean. During July (at aphelion), the northern half of our planet tilts toward the sun, heating up the land, which warms up easier than the oceans. During January, it's harder for the sun to heat the oceans, resulting in cooler average global temperatures, even though the Earth is closer to the sun. Because the air doesn't absorb all that much of the Sun's heat, but the ground does. In fact, the Sun does very little to warm the air. Most of the warmth in the air comes from the surface. The thermometer that was 10 times further away (100 cm) from the light bulb did not change temperature as much and therefore did not receive nearly as much energy from the light bulb. In the same way, planets that are further from the Sun receive less energy and therefore are generally colder. The reason that the lowest temperatures occur right before sunrise has to do with solar heating and radiation. The Earth and the Sun both emit heat from their surfaces. When the sun sets, we lose the heat from the sun, but the Earth continues to exert its heat into the atmosphere. The closer you are to the sun, the hotter the climate. Even a small move closer to the sun could have a huge impact. That's because warming would cause glaciers to melt, raising sea levels and flooding most of the planet. Without land to absorb some of the sun's heat, temperatures on Earth would continue to rise. This hot air can indeed rise. But as it does, the atmospheric pressure decreases, the air expands, and it cools. So, even though they're closer to the sun, thin air in the mountains keeps them colder than the thicker air in the lowlands surrounding them. Large landmasses in the Northern hemisphere cause isotherms to bend toward the equator in winter and poles in summer as they change their temperature much more than the water. Air temperatures over land fluctuate more because land changes its temperature much more rapidly than ocean water does. Around June, the northern hemisphere, during day time, gets a greater amount of direct sunlight than the southern hemisphere. This keeps the northern hemisphere warmer and the regions here experience summer season. Near June 21st, the summer solstice, the Earth is tilted such that the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude. This situates the northern hemisphere in a more direct path of the Sun's energy. The Northern Hemisphere has much more land than the Southern, which is mostly water. Water is thermal mass, providing a moderating effect. That is, water is more resistant to temperature change than land is.