Tropics

Due to the overhead sun, the tropics receive the most solar energy over the course of the year, and consequently have the highest temperatures on the planet.

The tropics maintain wide diversity of local climates, such as rain forests, monsoons, savannahs, deserts, and high altitude snow-capped mountains.

[5] The word "tropic" comes via Latin from Ancient Greek τροπή (tropē), meaning "to turn" or "change direction".

This angle is not perfectly fixed, mainly due to the influence of the moon, but the limits of the tropics are a geographic convention, and their variance from the true latitudes is very small.

[9] Areas with wet seasons are disseminated across portions of the tropics and subtropics, some even in temperate regions.

Also, there are alpine tundra and snow-capped peaks, including Mauna Kea, Mount Kilimanjaro, Puncak Jaya and the Andes as far south as the northernmost parts of Chile and Peru.

[13] The effects of steadily rising concentrations of greenhouse gases on the climate may be less obvious to tropical residents, however, because they are overlain by considerable natural variability.

Often the soils of tropical forests are low in nutrient content, making them quite vulnerable to slash-and-burn deforestation techniques, which are sometimes an element of shifting cultivation agricultural systems.

[16] Evidence suggests over time that the view of the tropics as such in popular literature has been supplanted by more well-rounded and sophisticated interpretations.

[17] Western scholars tried to theorise why tropical areas were relatively more inhospitable to human civilisations than colder regions of the Northern Hemisphere.

Tropical jungles and rainforests have much more humid and hotter weather than colder and drier temperaments of the Northern Hemisphere, giving to a more diverse biosphere.

This theme led some scholars to suggest that humid hot climates correlate to human populations lacking control over nature e.g. 'the wild Amazonian rainforests'.