Lucianne.com links to a Daily Mail (U.K.) article which reports the City of Los Angeles is painting its streets white to lower summertime high temperatures. It is amost shocking when LA does something smart, for a change.
Painting streets white isn’t as dumb as it sounds; it is easy to demonstrate that standing in the sun a white car gets less hot inside than a dark colored car. Understanding this, the roofs of most CA police cars are white, even when the car itself is mostly black. I have to wonder, however, the extent to which the road ‘paint’ stays white over time with the hard use LA dishes out to its pavement.
Basically white reflects a lot of the sun’s light energy instead of absorbing much of it. Has anyone asked what the unintended consequences will be, where thar reflected light goes and what it does when it gets there? Skin cancer? Snow blindness?
The sales of extra dark sunglasses will go up in LA, maybe sunscreen and limo tint on car windows as well.
