THE INDEPENDENT: ….Two years ago, Barack Obama’s top man on global warming, Professor Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy, suggested at the Royal Society in London that one of the most effective engineering measures to tackle rising temperatures is to paint roofs.
“If the building is air-conditioned, it’s going to be a lot cooler, it can use 10 or 15 per cent less electricity… you also do something in that you change the albedo of the Earth – you make it more reflective,” Professor Chu said. Now scientists, led by Professor Hashem Akberi, of Concordia University in Canada, have studied this in detail and found that it can have a significant impact.
They estimate that a city or town where the roofs and the pavements and roads have light-coloured surfaces can increase their albedo by about 10 per cent, which globally would provide a CO2 offset of between 130 billion and 150 billion tonnes – the same as taking every car in the world off the road for 50 years… (more)
Actually this makes sense. Black and darker colors absorb heat from the sun, which is why you are more likely to see a black dog panting on a cool sunny day than you are a white dog. If a white roof is absorbing less heat, then an AC unit is not working as hard to cool the contents within.
It’s also the obvious difference in temperature when you are in a city compared to a suburb or country. All that black asphalt and concreted holds the heat in- when you go where there is less, there is a significant drop in temperature. The idea is worth a shot and can’t hurt to try.