White paint is one solution to climate change
There’s a story in The Hindu today, White paint solution to climate change, which while the headline is not entirely true, the idea is sound I think.
Hashem Akbari has a vision of a shiny, happy world. He sees polished roads and cities that gleam in the sunlight. Rooftops are bright and pavements light. Akbari wants to turn our cities into a giant mirror and he needs your help. And paint, lots of it.
Yep, he simply wants us all to paint all black surfaces, roofs, roads, and so forth a gleaming shiny white. Sales of sunglasses will go up overnight. But does this idea make any sense?
It sounds simple, but the effect could be dramatic. Study after study has shown that buildings with white roofs stay cooler during the summer.
The change reduces the way heat accumulates in built-up areas – known as the urban heat island effect – and allows people who live and work inside to switch off power-hungry air conditioning units.
Aware of the benefit, California has forced warehouses and other commercial premises with flat roofs to make them white since 2005, and, if such an effort could be extended, the results could make a big difference.
Together, roads and roofs are reckoned to cover more than half the available surfaces in urban areas, which have spread over some 2.4% of the Earth’s land area. A mass movement to change their colour, Akbari calculates, would increase the amount of sunlight bounced off our planet by 0.03%. And, he says, that would cool the Earth enough to cancel out the warming caused by 44bn tonnes of CO2 pollution. If you think that sounds like a lot, then you’re right. It would wipe out the expected rise in global emissions over the next decade. It won’t solve the problem of climate change, Akbari says, but could be a simple and effective weapon to delay its impact – just so long as people start doing it in earnest.
As he points out, this is not a solution to global warming, but it does give us some breathing space. Time to buy some RayBan shares. — DS