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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Interesting,
Calculations which involve the planets albedo are always tricky, as a major contributor to the planet’s reflectivity is cloud cover; which is a nightmare to simulate on its own and of course dependant on climate.
I would suppose that if we were to consider this as a geoengineering technique it would be best to consider how rural landscape can be altered (crop selection?) as cities occupy only a small fraction of land area.
The Californian track, saving air conditioning costs, is far more marketable to the average consumer. If it has additional benefits, even better. It’s part of the broader message that needs to be got out there, preserving your environment should be saving you money!
L
This is an easy thing to do. There is a product available called snow white that you paint on it’s so easy to do and great for your house.
Yep, there’s no evidence at all for global warming! None! Except… oh wait… shit…
Once during a renovation of a trailer we accidentally removed the fasteners holding the tin roof on, thinking that it was alright to leave overnight we went home. The home owners awoke in the middle of the night to a terrific noise. The wind peeled back the tin roof like a sardine can. The construction company was very clever. They solved the problem by painting on a great product that you roll on like paint.it is white and I think it is called snow white.A great insulator,and a great solution for anyone needing an inexpensive new roof. It gave the home owners a new roof and we left knowing the job was well done and now I can feel better knowing I did the enivorment a favor instead of just scaring the hell out of two very nice elderly people. The noise was so loud it nearly gave them a heart attack.
I thought that it would make some sense to once again rub the dumb little doggies faces in their rhetorical poop. An excellent example follows:
Quoting caz:
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!”
Mmmm-kay… well, we don’t need to talk to an “environmentalist” for this one, really. How about we go to the Bush Administrations Environmental Protection Agency for this chestnut:
Quoting the EPA:
“Careful measurements have confirmed that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing and that human activities (principally, the burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use) are the primary cause. Human activities have caused the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane to be higher today than at any point during the last 650,000 years. Scientists agree it is very likely that most of the global average warming since the mid-20th century is due to human-induced increases in greenhouse gases, rather than to natural causes.”
I’ll swat caz with the paper, too. The National Climactic Data Center (a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce) mentions that:
“There has been a general, but not global, tendency toward reduced diurnal temperature range (DTR: the difference between daily high or maximum and daily low or minimum temperatures) over about 70% of the global land mass since the middle of the 20th century. However, for the period 1979-2005 the DTR shows no trend since the trend in both maximum and minimum temperatures for the same period are virtually identical; both showing a strong warming signal.”
Bad caz! Baaaaad!
what does this mean about all those black solar panels we are supposed to install on our rooftops? will heat absorption by solar panels be the next cause of global warming?
Please research HAARP (an invention by Nikola Tesla in the late 1800s) Your right, as far as compliance. I would never do something like that for a hoax. And that is exactly what global warming is. So are the new hurricanes in the GOM. Before the 1970s, history was taught that it had to be conspired to happen. Now we are taught that it just happens without reason. Fundemental ideas and intuition are taboo in the west and that is why no one here can detect outright lies right in front of them. Your intuition is the only key to the truth. That means check your conscience and ego at the door.
@ Chris - Your all-black in the Middle East is a bit off the mark. For women, yes. White can be seen through and I think we all understand why that won’t fly for women in the Middle East. Men tend to wear white because it is cooler for all of the well-known and stated reasons.
To all naysayers, in general, on this topic…
The Earth was once thought flat, too. Could it be that you/we don’t know everything?
Even if science hadn’t substantiated the existence of global warming, something which has even been accepted by Bush’s government, then at the least, I wonder this:
Why take the chance?
Don’t we often prepare for the worst and hope for the best? Just what if our actions are having a tragic impact on our environment — and consequently human existence? Isn’t it smarter to start living in reasonable ways rather than assume an all-is-well, nothing-can-happen-to-me posture?
Umm… I live in a cold climate. Dark coloured roads help make them safe when they hold heat from the day and melt snow and ice during dark hours. Can we keep them, please?
So you picture our Utopian world with all white houses and all the roads are gleaming white.
Hmmm.