White Roof America!These are basics. Consider the following:
1. Man has changed the face of this planet. We have built buildings and roads, and in addition to making emissions that have brought about a change in the atmosphere that is speeding up global warming, we build buildings and roads with black or dark roofs, and roads of hot black asphalt. This absorbs more heat than what nature put there, and radiates back into the atmosphere. What was there in most cases was "green", converting sunlight into stored carbon energy. Now sunlight heats roads and roofs so hot you could fry eggs on them.
2. Black absorbs and white reflects sunlight and heat. So a white roof bounces that solar heat away from the earth. If you absorb less, you don't get so damn hot. It is a difficult thing to change emissions and energy use right away, but by preventing absorption of solar radiation, you stop part of the problem of all this heat building up at the source, the connection point between the furnace and the kids in the room. It's like turning the heat down.
3. A white roof uses less energy to cool the building upon which it sits. This means less energy use, and as a result less emissions, which reduces the greenhouse gases as well (and "pisst"......... it saves you money, too!)
Get the full idea now. Picture the cold of winter, and you've been heating your house with the heater set to one setting, so you have a set amount of heat being generated to offset the cold. But then you insulate your attic, seal your windows and doors, and now it's getting hot, because there's not so much heat escaping. That's global warming. The other anagoly is this: Your car's heater is stuck on and stuck in high, and you can't turn it off. Your window is down, so when you drive in summer you sweat, but you can still drive...in winter you may get cold, but with a coat you can still drive... now a "friend" comes along and "fixes" your window, so now the windows that let some heat escape are up, but the window switch is broken, and the window can go up, but not down, and every time you touch the switch the window goes up just a bit higher, making the car hotter and hotter. That's global warming... The only way to continue to drive is to turn the heat down, and the only way to do that if you are a planet is to cast off the solar radiation that heats the world.
So if you can't get that balance back, and can't remove the heat, the amount of heat energy entering the "home" that you're generating or absorbing, you have to do something or burn up... That's where WhiteRoofAmerica comes in. You make your roof white, you retain less heat, you don't absorb as much heat, and in essence you've turned the heat down. You may be still sweating, but you don't have the option of going outside, you can't live in the basement, you can't even open the window, but at least now you won't pass out from the heat.
I have an A.S. in Oceanography, so studied in detail how ocean currents and the atmosphere works. We've disrupted the process, and now we have accelerated the melting of the polar ice caps to where the Arctic will be like Maine if we aren't careful. Hasn't human kind killed off enough species? We have to do something, and this is so easy to do. A white roof.
Personally, the total area of roofs I've painted white would cover a football field. This, at least, offsets my family's impact to a degree, if not more than my global responsibility. And that's the key word here, responsibility. We act without thinking of the long term or far reaching ramifications of our actions. It's like pissing in the stream you have to drink from, eventually you get sick.
Granted the earth has seem many global climates, ice ages, loss of ice, and this cycle raises and lowers the ocean level hundreds of feet. Picture an earth where New York City is the edge of a two mile high glacier. Long Island was created from the ice scraping dirt off New England and Canada and dropping it off in the Atlantic. That's Long Island. It was so heave it created depressions in the land, and that's the Great Lakes. If we melt ourselves into a 10 foot rise in sea level, the world will face great suffering. Since it is our development of the earth that created this problem, it has to be our re-development of what we created that needs to stop or reverse this problem.
Just look at what we've done to our world. Inaction is pure stupidity, because this will be the home of our children. It doesn't take crusading, it takes simple common sense.
Here's what a white roof does......
On average, you can save 60% on cooling costs, 50% of your total internal heat is reduced, a white roof reflects 85% of uv and 90% of infrared heat, and up to 98% of total reflection can make a 200F degree roof drop to 80F degrees. On the hottest day of summer you can walk barefoot on your roof!
White roads? Not likely. But a white roof not only makes environmental sense, it will extend the life of almost any roof, fills cracks and seals, and costs a lot less than a new roof. It basically IS a new roof, once applied that is.
And since I am a painter, and have done this, I can speak from experience. It's simple. Pressurewash your roof, prime it, caulk any big cracks, then simply apply the coating. No permits, no environmental hazard, maybe you get some on your shoes and pants, but BFD! Your attic no longer is the oven it was, and your air conditioning system works a lot less harder. Personally, I think a level should be set for heat absorption rates for roofs. The only thing black on a roof should be a solar collector for a solar hot water system or other type of clean, green energy system. While I love the idea of green roofs, they are still very expensive and a hard sell to large companies who look at the bottom line or simply cannot afford to go that green. I honestly believe there needs to be "heat fees" for any new roof, even re-roofs, where the heat absorption is greater than what is naturally occurring, and incentives for "going green", even if going green is going white.
Going Green!
There is also the option of having living roofs! On a white roof potted plant gardens can produce food, making use of otherwise wasted space. More information is available at:
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/greentips/a-greener-roofliterally.html
and:
http://www.greenroofs.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=339&Itemid=110
and by going solar by simply key wording "solar roof" on any search engine, or by checking with your utility provider or the D.O.E.
You can also consider mixing these options. Picture a white roof with food producing plants and a solar hot water heater and Photovoltaics!!
I can be contacted at (904) 781-9473 or WorldOfColor@Lycos.com, or Skotstar@yahoo.com
