Air rises where heating is strongest and sinks where it is weaker and cooler. In the global three-cell circulation, this happens most clearly in the Hadley cell near the equator: intense solar heating causes warm air to rise, creating the Intertropical Convergence Zone with frequent rain. As the air rises and moves poleward aloft, it cools and eventually sinks around the subtropics (around 30° latitude), forming the subtropical high-pressure belts. This sinking motion at the subtropics completes the circulation loop and sets up surface trade winds flowing back toward the equator. So the best description is that air rises at the equator and sinks at the subtropics.

The key idea is how surface currents affect temperature along coastlines. Along the northwest African coast, the water moves southward as a cold eastern boundary current of the North Atlantic gyre. The Canary Current brings cooler waters from higher latitudes toward the equator, and its coastal upwelling helps sustain rich marine life and cooler coastal conditions. This is different from the Gulf Stream and its extension, the North Atlantic Drift, which are warm currents moving northeast toward Europe, and from the Labrador Current that lies off eastern Canada. So the cold current along the northwest African coast is the Canary Current.

When sunlight reaches Earth, how concentrated it is depends on the angle at which it hits the surface. A high Sun means rays strike more directly, concentrating energy on a smaller area and making the surface feel more intense. In polar latitudes, the Sun is low in the sky, so rays arrive at a shallow angle. That same amount of energy is spread over a larger surface area on the ground, lowering the energy per square meter. This idea is often summarized by irradiance being related to the cosine of the solar zenith angle: as the zenith angle increases (Sun lower), the irradiance decreases. So the energy effectively covers a larger area, making the insolation less intense. The other options don’t fit because the energy per unit area isn’t the same or smaller with a low Sun, and the pattern isn’t irregular—it follows the geometry of the Sun’s angle.

Climate change boosts rainfall extremes in the UK by strengthening the atmosphere’s moisture content and altering storm paths. Warmer air holds more water vapor, so when rain systems release moisture, rainfall becomes more intense. At the same time, shifts in North Atlantic storm tracks change when and where rain falls, affecting seasonal totals. The result is a pattern of heavier rainfall events and greater variability, with wetter winters and the potential for hot, drier summers, leading to both flood and drought events. This description captures the observed and projected changes much better than ideas of a uniformly drier year or rainfall becoming evenly spread, and it contradicts the notion that extreme weather would decline.