Heat is energy, called thermal energy, and is just one type of energy. Other types of energy include electromagnetic, nuclear, sonic, gravitational, mechanical, chemical, potential and kinetic energy. All of these are at work in our daily lives and often work together. For instance, when you drive a car, you use electrical energy to start it. Fuel combustion is a chemical energy reaction that converts potential energy to mechanical energy; kinetic energy keeps you moving forward, and the result of the chemical reaction is thermal energy out of the tailpipe.

Thinking of heat as energy is helpful when trying to visualize how heat influences our lives outdoors. There are a couple of properties of thermal energy that are important to note. First, everything that exists above absolute zero (ze

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