A satellite photograph of New York City reveals a dark blot fronted to the north, west, and east by a sea of light green forest, and to the south by an actual sea: the pastel blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Into this blot, on hot summer days, soaks enough solar radiation to turn its denizens into sweaty, irritable, iced-latte swilling malcontents prone to cranking the air-conditioning full blast 24/7 while daydreaming about a weekend upstate. Those who live in fear of sweltering July subway rides days may soon have a respite, from an unlikely source. A just published study by researchers at ... Read More
Nature’s Cooling Albedo Disappearing Faster Than Thought
January 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Those who reject the notion of climate change often note that there’s a level of prediction in the other side’s concerns, and they correlate prediction with speculation and ultimately conflate it with guessing. That’s not entirely fair, but there is an element of educated guessing going on in developing models that will accurately predict tomorrow’s climate. The assumption from naysayers is that when the models don’t perform flawlessly, that failure can only show that global warming isn’t happening. But a new study led by the University of Michigan’s Mark G. Flanner and funded ... Read More
White House Signs Up for White Roofs
July 23, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in spring 2009, Miller-McCune reported — in two separate articles (here and here)—on the impressive virtues of “cool roofs” in the fight against climate change. Simply by painting urban surfaces white or a light color, we noted, “the carbon emissions of all 600 million of the world’s cars could be off-set for 18 to 20 years — at a savings equivalent to at least $1 trillion worth of CO2 reductions.” At the time, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Bay Area were lobbying the Obama administration to embrace the “cool roofs strategy” as a ... Read More
A White Roof Isn’t Always the Right Roof
May 15, 2009 • By • 8 Comments
Recently I have come across numerous articles promoting cool roofs, and although I work for a company that does indeed manufacture cool, white TPO (for thermoplastic olefin) roofs as well as dark-colored materials, I would like to offer some statistics and information that will inform your readers of the benefits of other roof systems.By having information on the different roof choices, building owners can choose the roof that is best for their location and climate, and that best solution isn't always white. The Cool Roof Rating Council admits to a "winter penalty" when cool roofs are ... Read More
Is White the New Green?
April 3, 2009 • By • 13 Comments
In early January, Hashem Akbari sent federal officials a rather improbable sounding proposal. An Iranian-born nuclear engineer who, for the last three decades, has worked as a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Akbari would like to see $3 billion of the economic stimulus package directed toward painting white or a light color as many of the nation's roofs, and as much of its pavement, as possible — all with the goal of directing more solar radiation into space. Akbari, along with Surabi Menon, another LBNL scientist, and Arthur Rosenfeld, a former LBNL scientist and ... Read More
Keeping Cool With the Albedo Effect
April 2, 2009 • By • 3 Comments
Govindasamy Bala and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discovered that by deforesting the entire world, the amount of carbon dioxide would double by 2100. But instead of a great rise in global temperature, their models determined that cutting down all the world's trees would cause the world to cool by 0.3 degrees C (a bit over half a degree Fahrenheit). How could doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere decrease the temperature? Doesn't that run counter to everything we know about global warming — that pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causes the ... Read More
