Painting Rooftops White Would Slow Global Warming
Study: If we painted every rooftop in 100 major cities white, it would offset the entire planet’s carbon dioxide emissions for one year. That’s nearly 44 metric gigatons.
It makes sense. We all know white reflects heat (that’s why we wear white shirts and dresses on hot days), and we even knew that painting rooftops white lessens the need for air conditioning. But until now, we didn’t know that changing dark-colored surfaces to white would help fight against global warming.
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The news broke yesterday at California’s Climate Change Research Conference. Hashem Akbari, attending the conference from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced that replacing dark shingles on an average-sized household rooftop with a lighter color would offset 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide—comparable to taking two mid-sized cars off the road for a year.
Speaking of roadways, they’re part of the problem too. Because of its cheap nature, most roads are paved with black asphalt instead of light grey concrete, which causes roads to absorb an inordinate amount of heat. Repaving roads with lighter-colored materials would have a similar impact to painting rooftops.
California already mandates that newly-built large buildings have light-colored rooftops, but the law was intended to decrease air conditioning costs. Akbari hopes to enlist the United Nations in an effort to convince major cities to make their roadways and rooftops more pale.
Read a full summary of the report here.
Photo Credit: Robert Whitlock on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
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That ‘full report’ references wikidictionary. How are we supposed to take it seriosuly?
What global warming? Global temperature data show the warming stopped in 1998. Temps have actually declined in the last couple of years. How many more years of no warming must we have before people stop scheming about ways to address this phantom menace?
We have more to fear from a colder world that from a warmer one. Cold shrinks the world’s temperate zones where most food is grown. It also forces us to use more energy to heat our homes and places of work.
How much CO2 would be produced manufacturing the new roofs? My guess is 45 gigatons.
So what! There is no evidence of man-made global warming. The global temperature of seven of the last ten years have been below normal! Spend 10 minutes researching on the internet and you see so much evidence against global warming. August had no sunspot activity, the first time in decades - the winter will be a cold one.
Hey JMD,
in a few years they tell us that they were wrong it carbon actually causes global cooling so to save the planet, blah, blah, blah….
OMG..will this lunacy ever end??? Not one environmentalist has ever been able to tell me what will happen after we decimate our economy to comply with all these ludicrous schemes. What will the temperature be? What storms will we avert? Honestly people…WE CAN CHANGE the climate about as much as we could make it rain on mars. We can’t and I would like just for once for people to stop playing God and believing that we have ANY CONTROL whatsoever on our climate. How incrediby arrogant!
Er… Plenty of us have been saying for years that painting roofs white would help solve this “problem”.
It’s just a shame that so many environmentalists aren’t listening. In the rush to introduce stupid taxes and economic systems, environmentalists won’t listen to anyone that doesn’t love Gore and think that Kyoto-2 or whatever will “save” the planet.
Thanks for the link though.
Is there perchance any research shoing how a doubling of the size of cities in the last 50 years has contributed to the planets warming?
That would really upset Hansen et al…
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“We all know white reflects heat (that’s why we wear white shirts and dresses on hot days)” Ah, but is it really so simple? In the Middle East, wearing all black is common. It was explained in a first-year physics text book that wearing loose, black clothing creates a convection current that actually helps cool the body better than wearing white does. See, that’s the danger with overly-simplistic thinking - other factors constantly get missed.
There also might be some factor (minor, but cumulative) to having dark roof tops in Northern climates leading to slightly lower heating/energy needs.
As for roads, you may want to consult an engineer, but I would think that painting an entire road would negatively impact a tire’s ability to properly grip the surface, in addition to possibly making daytime visibility more difficult (white roads on a sunny day would be pretty blinding). But then again, I suppose cars are “evil” so who cares anyway?