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The Sunlight Budget of Earth
Sunlight represents a seemingly endless source of largely untapped energy. Just how endless is it?
One somewhat dated but thorough example from 2007 comes from Helmut Haberl and his six co-authors at Klagenfurt University, who use a combination of global crop yields published by the Food and Agriculture Organization and land-use estimates based on satellite imagery. Haberl et al. lean on a modified version of a complex model called LPJ-DGVM, which describes flows of carbon and water between plant life (broken down into ten subtypes, such as “tropical broadleaved evergreen tree” and “C3 perennial grass”), the atmosphere, and multiple different kinds of soil, all as a function of climatic variables like sunlight, temperature, snowmelt, and more. To keep this number in perspective, though, all of the solar panels, lumber forests, grazing lands, crop fields, wild plants, and oceanic phytoplankton combined only account for about 0.5 percent of all the sunlight absorbed at the Earth’s surface.
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