Things are happening fast. Just tonight I heard a report on NPR that we may have open sea with no sea ice at the North Pole before 2009! It seems that we just don't have much time to bandy this about in a theoretical and/or rhetorical manner. There has been a lot of research done that we can draw upon for answers. I've listened to climatological pundits discuss at length what the very best method of turning back climate change might be. I've also come to the conclusion that what we should do is: EVERYTHING WE CAN and ALL AT ONCE. I dont' mean to sound trite, and I don't think that this is. Hearing "experts" tell us that one or another way of combating Global Warming isn't worth doing because doing it would only help a very small amount, and by itself would have no measureable impact misses the point. We're all individuals and almost nothing that any one or a few of us does will have a very large impact. However, the impact of millions or even billions of individuals each doing their little bit to help might and probably will make an important difference.
Given this point of view, I'm going to list everything I can think of that might help. Here goes:
1. Reflective roofs on our buildings. In the late 1970's, in Phoenix, Arizona where I lived then, I heard of reflective roof coatings that one could buy and apply to ones roof. The developers of this coating had researched white pigments and had come up with one that was particularly effective at reflecting a high percentage the light that fell upon it. It would help in two ways. A. It would lessen the energy needed to both cool and heat buildings. Reflective surfaces serve to reflect heat both in and out. It would help keep buildings warm in winter and cool in summer. B. By reflecting sunlight back out into space, it would help cool the earth. It might also just happen to extend the life of ones' roof covering. I've wondered just how great a surface area the buildings of the USA and even the world add up to. I'd love to hear from anyone who knows how to get a reasonably accurate estimate of this.
Beyond the simple issue of roofs, I was very impressed by the way that cities or rather the things that cities are constructed of, such as concrete and black top, had of soaking up and slowly giving off heat in such a way as to warm up its' entire environs. I lived in a house that, when I was very young, was out in the country. In fact, until I reached age of six, my grandfathers' mostly-organic dairy farm was located at the end of my street, less than a quarter of a mile away. At night in the summer, by around 9 or 10 PM a cooling breeze would come in off the surrounding rural and desert land. As the city grew around us and passed us by, the cooling breezes were replaced by the heat that was soaked up all day and given off all night. I think that there are other elements of our city environments that could benefit from more reflective surfaces. Roads and parking lots come to mind. White might cause too much glare to be safe, but could blacktop be somehow lightened to reflect a portion of the light that strikes it? It's something to think about.
1 comment:
Marc—thanks for starting your blog and thinking out side the box. Something as you say are intuitively obvious, cities give off heat.
For me, it gets back to overpopulation, too many cars, people, large cities, etc. I saw the corn field next to our neighborhood turn into a subdivision.
Your big point of doing everything we can at once is the best idea. Modern culture is going to burn every inch of fossil fuels it can get its hands on. We need to mitigate that impact now to lesson the curve. Your right too, that there are probably more unintended consequences of global warming that we have not even thought of.
Bravo—Marc thanks for your energy.
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