Paint it White

From the wonderful people who brought you "An Inconvenient Truth"...

Did you hear about this this week? Some supposed egghead smart enough to win a Nobel Prize (think "Al Gore"), has an idea to fight global warming:

Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more sunlight and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday.

Speaking at the opening of the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium, for which The Times is media partner, Professor Chu said that this approach could have a vast impact. By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the colour 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, he said.

If he's saying that it will require less energy to cool these buildings in the summer, that would require less energy to be generated, but then, they could require additional energy to heat them in the winter! BTW, my house in Ohio, the concrete driveway was tinted slightly to absorb extra heat. Wonder if the folks back there know something Steven Chu doesn't know?

And isn't one of the major arguments for global warming about "greenhouse" gases? Does anyone need a review of the whole "greenhouse" concept? The warmth of the sun enters the earth's atmosphere and is trapped like the warmth in a glass "greenhouse".
Unless any of these buildings are really, really tall, as in stratospherically tall, whatever heat they deflect is just going to be relocated somewhere else inside the earth's atmosphere. And that gets rid of global warming how exactly???

Color me unconvinced.

Cross posted at Say Anything