Comment by taskforcegemini

taskforcegemini Oct 12, 2025 parent

I think we should do more albedo engineering. like white roads and car roofs.

tjs8rj Oct 12, 2025

Back-of-the-envelope - Road area. World road length ≈ 60–70 million km. Using an average paved width of ~8–10 m ⇒ area ≈ (0.9–1.3)×10¹² m². Earth’s surface is 5.1×10¹⁴ m², so roads cover ~0.09–0.13% of the planet.

- Albedo change. Dark asphalt is ~0.05–0.10. “White” coatings can push toward ~0.4–0.6 (fresh), but weathering quickly dulls them. So a plausible Δalbedo for roads is +0.2 to +0.5.

- Global albedo change. Δα_global ≈ (road fraction) × (Δalbedo_road) ≈ (0.001)×(0.2–0.5) ≈ +0.0002 to +0.0005.

- Radiative forcing. Globally averaged incoming sunlight ≈ S₀/4 ≈ 340 W m⁻². Forcing from an albedo change is ΔF ≈ −Δα_global × 340 ≈ −0.07 to −0.17 W m⁻².

- Temperature response. Using a standard sensitivity ~0.8 °C per W m⁻² (≈3 °C per CO₂ doubling): ΔT ≈ −0.05 to −0.14 °C at equilibrium.

Llamamoe Oct 12, 2025

White roads could potentially be blinding, but yeah something lighter than what we do currently could be very worthwhile. It'd have much higher nighttime visibility too.

wishfish Oct 12, 2025

I'm thinking about light colored roads that seem to be made of concrete. See them here and there. Seemed to be more of them when I was a kid.

Wonder if that would make a substantial difference? Much brighter than asphalt but not bright enough to bother drivers.

Llamamoe Oct 12, 2025

I was thinking you could potentially engineer them to reflect IR light, but I feel like dust and dirt would probably quickly eat into the effectiveness. The question is whether it'd really make a difference on a global scale at all.

thfuran Oct 12, 2025

There are materials that do what you're looking for surprisingly effectively, staying many degrees sub-ambient even in direct sunlight. (See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eom2.12284 for example). But a roadway is a really difficult use case for a surface coating. With something like 50% of the surface area of many American cities being road or parking, there's a lot of potential room for effectively mitigating the urban heat island effect, but I think roofs are a better target. They don't have cars sitting on top of them blocking sightlines nearly as often.

Razengan Oct 12, 2025

> White roads could potentially be blinding

Hell I was just walking down the street a minute ago and thinking the same! It's October ffs! (It IS October right?)

gessha Oct 12, 2025

Teslas will start crashing like there’s no tomorrow.

antonvs Oct 12, 2025

So nothing much will change?

This item has no comments currently.

Preferences

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

Navigation

Miscellaneous