Poorgrad,
Our problems can be saved just with a little white paint.....
Energy secretary Steven Chu, who while in London pitched an idea from his former colleagues at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Painting roofs white to reflect sunlight can make a huge difference to global warming. From the Times of London:
“There’s a friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Art Rosenfeld, who’s pushing very hard for a geo-engineering we all believe will be completely benign, and that’s when you have a flat-top roof building, make it white. “Now, you smile, but he’s done a calculation, and if you take all the buildings and make their roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour, and you do this uniformly . . . it’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years.”
The thing is, secretary Chu actually understated the potential benefits of global whitewashing. The Lawrence research he refers to (which we wrote about last fall) says that white roofs and pavements could mean a one-time reduction of 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That, Art Rosenfeld said, translates to removing all the cars in the world for 18 years.
Of course, that’s the best-case scenario. Most roofs are sloped, not flat. Using “cool colored” paint on sloping roofs—as California will require starting this summer—would lead to a global reduction on the order of 24 billion tons.
Proponents of the idea tout other advantages—reflective surfaces also reduce temperatures in urban “heat islands,” and reduce the need for air-conditioning, which in turn reduces the demand for electricity, which generates its own greenhouse-gas emissions.
