White Roofs And Climate Change

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

White roofs and climate change.

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. Installing white roofs or painting them white has been promoted as a way to help slow global warming. 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. Recently i ve argued that in some cases as in discerning the long term global temperature trend a little common sense will suffice.

Plans to slow climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space could in fact raise temperatures a new study concludes. 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. The climate impact of white roofs may provide a case in point.

The most well known type of reflective surface is the cool roof. Effects of urban surfaces and white roofs on global and regional. There are many small scale initiatives in cities to make roof surfaces more reflective. 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.

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.