Climate crisis: Paint the roads white and give all houses grass roofs

The best way to tackle global warming is to reduce CO2 emissions – but what other ways are there to cool the planet down? Steven Cutts investigates

Drought and global warming have contributed to severe water shortages in Tehuacan Valley in Mexico (Getty)

The climate crisis looks like a huge potential threat to mankind, and the future doesn’t seem very bright. The mainstream scientific community has a list of credible reasons why we need to be afraid, and most of them have a list of measures that might be able to save us from catastrophe. But what if they’re wrong? What if we do everything that the mainstream climate change scientists advise and the Earth’s temperature continues to rise? When we have no more cards left to play, surely we’re going to have to look elsewhere?

Other than cutting CO2 emissions, is there anything else we can do to cool things down?

When heat from the sun strikes this planet, it isn’t necessarily absorbed. Freshly fallen snow reflects about 90 per cent of the incident sunlight. In contrast, a modern road surface might reflect as little of 4 per cent, whereas grass reflects about 25 per cent. This means that if we lay a lot of concrete roads over land that was previously covered in grass then the amount of heat energy absorbed in that area will go up. Some scientists believe that by changing the surface finish of a modern city, we ought to be able to reflect more sunlight back out into space and reduce the ambient temperature.