White Roofs And Climate Change

People should paint their roofs white and drive cool cars on pale coloured roads to avoid devastating climate change us energy secretary and nobel prize winning physicist steven chu has advised.

White roofs and climate change.

Effects of urban surfaces and white roofs on global and regional. New york for instance introduced rules on white roofs into its building codes as long ago as 2012. Volunteers have taken white paint to nearly 7 million square feet of tar roofs in the city though that is still only about 1 percent of the potential roof area. Plans to slow climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space could in fact raise temperatures a new study concludes.

There are many small scale initiatives in cities to make roof surfaces more reflective. How white roofs help to reflect the sun s heat april 14 2020 3 54pm edt nilesh bakshi maibritt pedersen zari te herenga waka victoria university of wellington. The lab s research confirms the arizona findings that white roofs reduce global warming proving three times more effective at countering climate change than even green roofs thanks to all that. Reflective surfaces are a form of geoengineering.

The most well known type of reflective surface is the cool roof. The idea of painting our roofs and roads white to offset global warming is not new but a recent study has calculated just how significantly white surfaces could impact greenhouse gas emissions. In a climate where temps can be in the high 70 s to mid 80 s 8 months of the year and into the low hundreds the rest of the time a white roof would seem to be a no brainer. Reflective surfaces can deliver high solar reflectance the ability to reflect the visible infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths of the sun reducing heat transfer to the surface and high thermal emittance the ability to radiate absorbed or non reflected solar energy.

New research shows that white roofs may actually add to global warming.