Hugh Pickens writes "Dr. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. Chu said at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years. Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 percent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 percent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed." (Continues, below.)
"An increase in pale surfaces would help to contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning. Since 2005 California has required all flat roofs on commercial buildings to be white and Georgia and Florida give incentives to owners who install white or light-colored roofs. Put another way, boosting how much urban rooftops reflect would be a one-time carbon-offset equivalent to preventing 44 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. 'For the first time, we're equating the value of reflective roof surfaces and CO2 reduction,' says Dr. Hashem Akbari. 'This does not make the problem of global warming go away. But we can buy ourselves some time.'"
Makes me wonder why roofs and not pavement. There's a lot of roads and parking lots around the world. Seems like there's more surface area of those than roofs.
that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement
Personally, I wouldn't want to drive on a surface that bright; I'd be squinting even with my sunglasses on!
Also, as a current resident of California, I can see the value in having a light-colored car or house, but as a former resident of New Hampshire, I can tell you that having a black car and black roof on a cold but sunny winter's day is very helpful! Snow slides off my car roof with ease, and it means I didn't have to turn the heat up quite so much!
That's a blatant lie. The weatherman was joking about it a few nights ago, but it's true.
Season 1 - Hot: February 15 through December 15
Highs from the high 80's to low triple digits.
Lows in the mid 70's to high 80's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
Season 2 - Cold: December 16 through February 14
Highs in the mid 60's to low 80's,
Lows from the high 20's to mid 70's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
I've lived here for 30 years. That's always an accurate prediction. The only variation is when a tropical storm or hurricane blows through, and they only increase the chance of rain from 50% to 100%.
Here in Victoria, Australia 90% of road work happens in the last month of the financial year, which is now. I used to work for the state road authority. One year, on the last day of june:
I've noticed, new asphalt in the Florida summer (say 90F to 110F) roads turn into mirages, Entire cars can disappear in the at less than 1/10 mile. You can see the heat rising from them.
In older asphalt roads, where they're sun bleached and worn, the heat isn't as much of a problem.
And I've never seen it on concrete roads.
I've wondered about roads and roofs being a contributing factor to global warming. There's a lot of square miles of roofs and roads that have increased relation to the population. It's always been notable that cities are hotter than the countryside surrounding them.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines. We're taking massive amounts of stored energy (oils, etc) and turning them into heat and motion. How many BTU per hour does an average car put off? In passenger vehicles, even in the winter, a small fraction of that heat is redirected into the passenger compartment, and can turn it into a freakin' oven. Look at the size of the heater core versus the radiator.
In the summer, that's increased, as the load on the cooling system is added onto by running the A/C in the car (more load on the engine). The amount of heat moved from the passenger compartment to the outside should be a wash, as should the heat transfer from a building.
Not just quick dry... All cement is an exothermic reaction. And would people SERIOUSLY stop calling concrete cement. Roads are made of concrete, which is a mixture of cement, aggregate, and water. Cement is only the binder of the mix.
There is a tipping point to the cement argument which is why you don't see it in truly cold locations like Canada. Cement roads have a longer lifespan than asphalt and it works out to be cheaper in some locations. In other locations,due frost, the ground moves too much to see the return on investment. In Canada where there is heavy frost every winter a cement road would still be required to be repaired every year but at a much greater cost due to the cracks caused by frost. This is why you see more cement roads in the southern states and less in the northern. Asphalt's lower cost to install and repair makes it a better fit in colder areas. Neither is a perfect solution but each serves it's purpose in it's place. The perfect solution, as always, is to give us our flying cars.
Ontario Highway 115, which runs between Peterborough, Ontario, and Hwy 401 just outside Toronto, is a test road. They put it in decades ago, and tested several different road surfaces, including several different types of cement and light-coloured road surfaces.
The cement has, on the whole, stood up better than the asphalt. And believe me, it gets cold in Pete.
Although this would reduce the amount of energy used for cooling, heating costs would go up. For most people, it takes far more energy to heat a house than cool it. It takes 1200 KWh to cool a house in a temperate climate for a year, but it takes 12000 KWh to heat one . It is more useful to look for ways to heat a house more efficiently than cool it.
uhh, in the winter your roof is covered by snow anyways, so the color your roof is not going to make any difference. And for states/countries where it doesn't snow in the winter, you probably also don't need 12000KWh to heat them up.
In the winter, a dark, hot roof doesn't heat a house very effectively (heat rising and all that- plus there's less incident solar energy).
In the summer, there's a lots of solar energy hitting your roof; and a hot roof leads to a hot attic, which retards flow of heat/hot air in the house (heat rising and all that).
So, a light-colored roof has a much more profound impact on cooling than on heating.
A metal roof will help both heating and cooling- and snow slides off them- but they are not cheap!
The other replies have told you why you are wrong. I will tell you how to harness the principle to your benefit, but it has nothing to do with your roof. I saw it in Mother Earth News (how apparently ironic that the acronym is MEN) but the idea is old; you paint the exterior wall black, cover it with a sheet of glass or plastic, and put a vent at the top and bottom. In the summer you would prefer to cover it with white shutters to reflect unwanted solar energy. In winter, you open the shutters and the vents. Convection provides circulation.
In theory, you could do the same thing on your roof, but you'd need some sort of forced air system to bring the air down where you can use it; all you need in your home is a ceiling fan.
A house built to with heat conservation in mind should almost heat itself. I've moved into a new flat building in the UK, between all the insulation and double glazing its actually hard for me to get the flat cooler than 21 degrees.
During the winter when it reached -8 degrees outside, my flat without any heating was at 16 degrees. My neighbours have the same issue, we only have the one small flat below us so the heat isn't coming from downstairs.
I can think of several other new buildings which suffer from this problem. If your going to argue about the color of a building mandating improved heat conservation should remove most of the heating costs.
Believe it or not, there is a lot of research going into creating lighter colored surfaces for roads. One of the advantages is that it takes less light (and thus energy) to light up the surface at night. This also decreases the amount of "light pollution" you would have around town. There are other advantages to improving water quality and decreasing noise.
However, one of the current hangups is how to keep them light? Unless we can also change the rubber in the tires to be lighter color as well, the road surfaces just end up black again in high traffic areas like California.
and make all the birds blind.
we had a man in the neighborhood who had a white roof and it was filled with dead birds.
birds fly towards white objects for some reason as if it's the sky, and splatter to death.
That's also why roofs are painted that way in tropical regions. No birds on the roof means you can gather a clean water supply from rainfall. Bermuda does this with excellent success.
Now, you smile, but he's done a calculation, and if you take all the buildings and make their roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour, and you do this uniformly . . . it's the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years.
There might be some safety issues with making road surfaces reflect more light. ..things that come to mind:
* Increased road glare on sunny days - good sun glasses could largely deal with this, but if you don't happen to have a pair of sunglasses, you might be having a pretty hard time seeing on very bright days.
* Night driving: harder to see the painted lines and reflectors embedded in the concrete (I'm not sure if this would really be much of a problem or not, but maybe could be)
* Winter driving - In the winter, I'm sure that black pavement absorbing sunlight has some beneficial effect in the form of melting ice off the road sooner than light-colored pavement would. Lighter colored road surfaces might lead to ice lasting longer, or requiring more salt to be put on the roads by road crews.
There are very free lunches in the world of energy production and consumption. Lightening the color of pavement and roofing materials about as close as we get. From a DOE study [osti.gov]:
As an example, computer simulations for Los Angeles, CA show that resurfacing about two-third of the pavements and rooftops with reflective surfaces and planting three trees per house can cool down LA by an average of 2-3K. This reduction in air temperature will reduce urban smog exposure in the LA basin by roughly the same amount as removing the basin entire onroad vehicle exhaust. Heat island mitigation is an effective air pollution control strategy, more than paying for itself in cooling energy cost savings. We estimate that the cooling energy savings in U.S. from cool surfaces and shade trees, when fully implemented, is about $5 billion per year (about $100 per air-conditioned house).
Amazing, isn't it? Two to three degrees in temperature reduction in a major city just by resurfacing, repainting, and planting trees. Yeah, sure, it's not sexy. But the cost savings... staggering. Add in the health benefits of reducing smog, plus the reduction of human misery from over-heated citys, and you wonder why we haven't done this years ago.
I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama. You picked a scientist to run an agency. You gave him a mission to better humanity through reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption. You gave him a platform where he would be heard. Well done indeed.
I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama.
My cynicism knows no bounds, which gives me to think what the Democratic response to this might have been if a Bush Administration official had proposed it. I'm betting something to the tune of, "Oh those damned Republicans they want to use band-aid technological fixes so they can go on driving their SUVs over baby polar bears for another ten years!"
I think this is a good idea, and if Chu can make it happen (again, colour me cynical) it'll be a good thing, particularly because of the reduced energy demand aspect, which will help with the whole peak oil deal.
But I can't help thinking about how mindless partisans (not necessarily you) would have reacted if the Offence rather than the Defence had suggested this (both parties are ultimately on the same team, of course, representing the plutocrats united against the people.)
That's nice for the hot countries. What about cold countries? Maybe we like having black roofs and roads to melt the snow faster if there's a little opening?
That's nice for the hot countries. What about cold countries? Maybe we like having black roofs and roads to melt the snow faster if there's a little opening?
Yes. Or nearly so. I just happened to be doing some research on roof treatments. There are basically two types -- for flat roofs. Angled roofs are a different story since they're angled for snow and rain shedding. The two types of flat-roof coatings are white paint and aluminum paint.
White paint coatings use titanium dioxide as a pigment (very, very white) and reflect 70-80 percent of incident light. That means they keep the roof cool in the summer. They are, however, reasonably transparent to IR from below, so unfortunately do nothing to hold heat in during the winter.
Aluminum paint coatings use little flakes of alumnimum and reflect about 50-60 percent of incident light. That means they also keep the roof cool in the summer. They are, however, much less transparent to IR from below, so help keep in heat during the winter by reflecting it back down.
Then again, nothing stops you from painting your flat roof white or aluminum and unrolling black sheeting during the winter to help absorb heat from the sun.
"I don't want to get too technical on this black paint versus white paint and reflection of heat and so forth because it misses the point." He always says something like that and what it really means is "I don't want to get too technical on this [Inser topic] becasue there are no technical aspects to my argument that are true.
Fight it on the rights issue, but don't fight it on a science issue when you do not understand the science.
Or we could put solar panels on roofs and convert the sunlight, that would ordinarily be converted to heat, into electricity which I am sure we could find a use for.
Paint roofs white? With the efficiency increases in photo-electric technology, why not put solar panels on every roof? Not only would we reduce the amount of heat being re-radiated back into the atmosphere but, if done on a global scale, we'd eliminate one of the primary reasons for climate change in the first place : the burning of fossil fuels. And before you respond with "but it will cost too much and generate more CO2 than it eliminates" let me give you one word : Bootstrapping [wikipedia.org]. That's right -- Use the power from the existing global infrastructure for solar energy capture to build more global infrastructure for solar energy capture; That way, you would generate a minimal amount of greenhouse gases in the manufacture of new solar panels while at the same time creating a self-sustaining positive feedback loop wherein the more energy we can capture, the more energy capture infrastructure we can build, resulting in our ability to capture more energy.
Reduce heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building â" especially if it is glassed in so as to act as a terrarium and passive solar heat reservoir â" a concentration of green roofs in an urban area can even reduce the city's average temperatures during the summer.
... by painting all the solar cells on my roof white. But I'm gonna have to do this all over again because these solar cells aren't making any electricity.
No, that was accurate - the climate is changing all the time, and humans have caused various changes to accelerate in ways that are detrimental to the survival of our species (growth of deserts, loss of farmland, etc.)
What this is proposing, is a way to mitigate some of the detrimental changes.
That aside, why the snark? I understand that people of course have personal investment in their enviroment (it's where we live, after all), but for someone proposing a simple change like this that could have multiple beneficial results for our species, I'm not sure why you feel so threatened.
Pavement (Score:4, Interesting)
Makes me wonder why roofs and not pavement. There's a lot of roads and parking lots around the world. Seems like there's more surface area of those than roofs.
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
From TFS:
that by lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the color of cement
Personally, I wouldn't want to drive on a surface that bright; I'd be squinting even with my sunglasses on!
Also, as a current resident of California, I can see the value in having a light-colored car or house, but as a former resident of New Hampshire, I can tell you that having a black car and black roof on a cold but sunny winter's day is very helpful! Snow slides off my car roof with ease, and it means I didn't have to turn the heat up quite so much!
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wouldn't want to drive on a surface that bright; I'd be squinting even with my sunglasses on!
If you've driven on an interstate in the mid-west, chances are you've driven on cement. It really isn't any worse than asphalt.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
In New England, we have four seasons:
Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
In Florida, we have only one season:
#RandomWeatherPattern
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
In California we have 3 seasons: Spring, Rain and Fire.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
That's a blatant lie. The weatherman was joking about it a few nights ago, but it's true.
Season 1 - Hot: February 15 through December 15
Highs from the high 80's to low triple digits.
Lows in the mid 70's to high 80's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
Season 2 - Cold: December 16 through February 14
Highs in the mid 60's to low 80's,
Lows from the high 20's to mid 70's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
I've lived here for 30 years. That's always an accurate prediction. The only variation is when a tropical storm or hurricane blows through, and they only increase the chance of rain from 50% to 100%.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
In Canada we have two seasons: winter and what they call winter in New England.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
It's a little of this, or a little of that.
I've noticed, new asphalt in the Florida summer (say 90F to 110F) roads turn into mirages, Entire cars can disappear in the at less than 1/10 mile. You can see the heat rising from them.
In older asphalt roads, where they're sun bleached and worn, the heat isn't as much of a problem.
And I've never seen it on concrete roads.
I've wondered about roads and roofs being a contributing factor to global warming. There's a lot of square miles of roofs and roads that have increased relation to the population. It's always been notable that cities are hotter than the countryside surrounding them.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines. We're taking massive amounts of stored energy (oils, etc) and turning them into heat and motion. How many BTU per hour does an average car put off? In passenger vehicles, even in the winter, a small fraction of that heat is redirected into the passenger compartment, and can turn it into a freakin' oven. Look at the size of the heater core versus the radiator.
In the summer, that's increased, as the load on the cooling system is added onto by running the A/C in the car (more load on the engine). The amount of heat moved from the passenger compartment to the outside should be a wash, as should the heat transfer from a building.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
Then I'll dab your eye with wet cement and then dab your other eye with molten asphalt and you tell me which is REALLY easier ON your eyes.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
Not just quick dry... All cement is an exothermic reaction. And would people SERIOUSLY stop calling concrete cement. Roads are made of concrete, which is a mixture of cement, aggregate, and water. Cement is only the binder of the mix.
Parent
Re:Lisa. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Interesting)
Ontario Highway 115, which runs between Peterborough, Ontario, and Hwy 401 just outside Toronto, is a test road. They put it in decades ago, and tested several different road surfaces, including several different types of cement and light-coloured road surfaces.
The cement has, on the whole, stood up better than the asphalt. And believe me, it gets cold in Pete.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
uhh, in the winter your roof is covered by snow anyways, so the color your roof is not going to make any difference. And for states/countries where it doesn't snow in the winter, you probably also don't need 12000KWh to heat them up.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
In the winter, a dark, hot roof doesn't heat a house very effectively (heat rising and all that- plus there's less incident solar energy).
In the summer, there's a lots of solar energy hitting your roof; and a hot roof leads to a hot attic, which retards flow of heat/hot air in the house (heat rising and all that).
So, a light-colored roof has a much more profound impact on cooling than on heating.
A metal roof will help both heating and cooling- and snow slides off them- but they are not cheap!
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Interesting)
The other replies have told you why you are wrong. I will tell you how to harness the principle to your benefit, but it has nothing to do with your roof. I saw it in Mother Earth News (how apparently ironic that the acronym is MEN) but the idea is old; you paint the exterior wall black, cover it with a sheet of glass or plastic, and put a vent at the top and bottom. In the summer you would prefer to cover it with white shutters to reflect unwanted solar energy. In winter, you open the shutters and the vents. Convection provides circulation.
In theory, you could do the same thing on your roof, but you'd need some sort of forced air system to bring the air down where you can use it; all you need in your home is a ceiling fan.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
During the winter when it reached -8 degrees outside, my flat without any heating was at 16 degrees. My neighbours have the same issue, we only have the one small flat below us so the heat isn't coming from downstairs.
I can think of several other new buildings which suffer from this problem. If your going to argue about the color of a building mandating improved heat conservation should remove most of the heating costs.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, where is all this paint coming from? What are the environmental and economic impacts of making all of this paint?
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Cool_paving [eoearth.org]
However, one of the current hangups is how to keep them light? Unless we can also change the rubber in the tires to be lighter color as well, the road surfaces just end up black again in high traffic areas like California.
Parent
Re:Pavement (Score:4, Informative)
not only that, the pain they use on roads is terrible for traction. Even just stop lines can be brutal for motorcycles.
You would have to add the pigment to the actual road material for it to be at all practical.
Parent
Paint the bears, too (Score:5, Funny)
Moon (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone should hang their bare white bottoms out the window, in order to reverse the global warming trend.
and make all (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:and make all (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:and make all (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:and make all (Score:5, Funny)
They do not fly into them, either.
Parent
White asphalt? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now all we need is white tar...
Re:White asphalt? (Score:5, Insightful)
There might be some safety issues with making road surfaces reflect more light. . .things that come to mind:
* Increased road glare on sunny days - good sun glasses could largely deal with this, but if you don't happen to have a pair of sunglasses, you might be having a pretty hard time seeing on very bright days.
* Night driving: harder to see the painted lines and reflectors embedded in the concrete (I'm not sure if this would really be much of a problem or not, but maybe could be)
* Winter driving - In the winter, I'm sure that black pavement absorbing sunlight has some beneficial effect in the form of melting ice off the road sooner than light-colored pavement would. Lighter colored road surfaces might lead to ice lasting longer, or requiring more salt to be put on the roads by road crews.
Parent
Nice to have a Sec of Energy actually Read the Lit (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing, isn't it? Two to three degrees in temperature reduction in a major city just by resurfacing, repainting, and planting trees. Yeah, sure, it's not sexy. But the cost savings ... staggering. Add in the health benefits of reducing smog, plus the reduction of human misery from over-heated citys, and you wonder why we haven't done this years ago.
I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama. You picked a scientist to run an agency. You gave him a mission to better humanity through reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption. You gave him a platform where he would be heard. Well done indeed.
Re:Nice to have a Sec of Energy actually Read the (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is going to sound like a self-serving political statement from a hardcore Democrat -- but well done, President Obama.
My cynicism knows no bounds, which gives me to think what the Democratic response to this might have been if a Bush Administration official had proposed it. I'm betting something to the tune of, "Oh those damned Republicans they want to use band-aid technological fixes so they can go on driving their SUVs over baby polar bears for another ten years!"
I think this is a good idea, and if Chu can make it happen (again, colour me cynical) it'll be a good thing, particularly because of the reduced energy demand aspect, which will help with the whole peak oil deal.
But I can't help thinking about how mindless partisans (not necessarily you) would have reacted if the Offence rather than the Defence had suggested this (both parties are ultimately on the same team, of course, representing the plutocrats united against the people.)
Parent
why roofs in hot countries are whitewashed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:why roofs in hot countries are whitewashed (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice for the hot countries. What about cold countries? Maybe we like having black roofs and roads to melt the snow faster if there's a little opening?
Yes. Or nearly so. I just happened to be doing some research on roof treatments. There are basically two types -- for flat roofs. Angled roofs are a different story since they're angled for snow and rain shedding. The two types of flat-roof coatings are white paint and aluminum paint.
Here's the link: http://eetd.lbl.gov/coolroof/coating.htm [lbl.gov]
White paint coatings use titanium dioxide as a pigment (very, very white) and reflect 70-80 percent of incident light. That means they keep the roof cool in the summer. They are, however, reasonably transparent to IR from below, so unfortunately do nothing to hold heat in during the winter.
Aluminum paint coatings use little flakes of alumnimum and reflect about 50-60 percent of incident light. That means they also keep the roof cool in the summer. They are, however, much less transparent to IR from below, so help keep in heat during the winter by reflecting it back down.
Then again, nothing stops you from painting your flat roof white or aluminum and unrolling black sheeting during the winter to help absorb heat from the sun.
Parent
According to Rush Limbaugh ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:According to Rush Limbaugh ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I don't want to get too technical on this black paint versus white paint and reflection of heat and so forth because it misses the point."
He always says something like that and what it really means is "I don't want to get too technical on this [Inser topic] becasue there are no technical aspects to my argument that are true.
Fight it on the rights issue, but don't fight it on a science issue when you do not understand the science.
Parent
Re:According to Rush Limbaugh ... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, I think this is the first time I've ever heard him say something nice about something black.
Parent
White paint or solar panels? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or we could put solar panels on roofs and convert the sunlight, that would ordinarily be
converted to heat, into electricity which I am sure we could find a use for.
Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't RTFA but the summary sounds retarded.
jdb2
Great for Global warming.... (Score:5, Interesting)
and sea levels, but not for the pH balance of the oceans, which are acidifying as they absorb additional carbon [wikipedia.org] from the atmosphere.
I remember reading about green roofs (growing plants etc on the roof of buildings) and the effect it had on temperatures when done in urban environments [wikipedia.org]:
Reduce heating (by adding mass and thermal resistance value) and cooling (by evaporative cooling) loads on a building â" especially if it is glassed in so as to act as a terrarium and passive solar heat reservoir â" a concentration of green roofs in an urban area can even reduce the city's average temperatures during the summer.
The Fairmont Hotel, here in Vancouver BC does this, growing herbs for the hotel kitchens. [uwaterloo.ca]
I already did this ... (Score:5, Funny)
... by painting all the solar cells on my roof white. But I'm gonna have to do this all over again because these solar cells aren't making any electricity.
Re:Time out (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Time out (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it likely to be reversble if it isn't happening?
Parent
Re:Time out (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that was accurate - the climate is changing all the time, and humans have caused various changes to accelerate in ways that are detrimental to the survival of our species (growth of deserts, loss of farmland, etc.)
What this is proposing, is a way to mitigate some of the detrimental changes.
That aside, why the snark? I understand that people of course have personal investment in their enviroment (it's where we live, after all), but for someone proposing a simple change like this that could have multiple beneficial results for our species, I'm not sure why you feel so threatened.
Parent
Re:Time out (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, even if we can't reverse the process, there are other good reasons to lower our energy consumption.
Energy isn't free; by polluting less, you often spend less in the long run... It's not only good for the planet, it's good for the economy in general.
Both shouldn't be seen as incompatible things.
Parent
Re:Run away Whitehouse (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Run away Whitehouse (Score:5, Funny)
Once you go white, you never go back?
Parent