New reflective coating will keep homes of the future cooler: The Guardian

Tests show coating can reduce solar heating by up to 20% – and it doesn’t just come in white

Santerini, Greece

Painting homes white, as residents have done in Santorini, Greece, can help keep the interior cool.

Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty

As the dazzling buildings on the Greek island of Santorini demonstrate, painting your home white helps to keep it cool. Wearing white clothes is also a good way of beating the heat on hot days.

But it isn’t easy to keep white clothes clean, and some of us like a bit more colour in our lives. Thankfully, a new ultra-reflective coating will offer a kaleidoscope of cooling colours to choose from.

Yuan Yang, a materials scientist at Columbia University in New York City, and colleagues have developed a specialised paint coating made from two layers. The bottom layer is made using a porous polymer that scatters and reflects infrared light; the upper layer is a commercial coloured paint.

Testing carried out on a sunny summer’s day showed the black version of the two-layer paint kept an object 15.6C (28.8F) cooler than standard black paint. If applied to a building the scientists estimate their coating could reduce solar heating on a wall by 10-20%.

The research, reported in the Science Advances journal, suggests the new coating is adaptable and could be used to paint buildings, cars and even textiles, giving the residents of Santorini the option of a colour change.

Read The Guardian Story

Kate Ravilious

@katerav

Published on Tue 23 Jun 2020

Is your local government body climate change ready?

Three local government areas in or near Melbourne, Australia,

have encouraged their residents to be climate change ready by planning for:

• wildfire

• flood

• storms

• heat waves

• sea rise

• coastal inundation

• drought

climateready.com.au

Visit climateready.com.au for ideas and planning information.

Your local government may have similar information. If not, you can ask why not.

As Protests Rage Over George Floyd’s Death, Climate Activists Embrace Racial Justice: Insideclimatenews

#climatejustice

'When New York Communities for Change helped lead a demonstration of 500 on Monday in Brooklyn to protest George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis, the grassroots group's activism spoke to a long-standing link between police violence against African Americans and environmental justice.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latino community-based organization, said she considers showing up to fight police brutality and racial violence integral to her climate change activism. 

Bronx Climate Justice North, another grassroots group, says on its website: "Without a focus on correcting injustice, work on climate change addresses only symptoms, and not root causes."

Read the Inside Climate News article

2.0°C Would Shift Once-in-a-Century Storms to Once in Five Years, Canadian Study Concludes: The Energy Mix

Flooding - Climate Change

Researchers at Environment and Climate Change Canada have established an unequivocal correlation between climate change and the increasing number of extreme rainfall events in North America—and the data suggests things will get worse if warming continues. 

While the relationship between a warmer world and a (catastrophically) wetter one has been confirmed at global and hemispheric levels, the Canadian study is one of the first to connect the dots at the continental level, reports CBC. In the study’s first step, the researchers showed that major downpours did increase at sites around the United States and Canada between 1961 and 2010. Then, they compared those observations to climate models that predicted such a trend for a warmer atmosphere.