Editor’s Note: Portions of this story appear in “.Sales of air-conditioned shirts and day- or weeklong heatstroke insurance policies are booming in Japan. Seville, Spain, became the first city to start naming heat waves like hurricanes, and after they appointed a chief heat officer, Miami, Los Angeles and Phoenix soon followed suit.As our kids get older, our cities will get brighter.While locals in places like Mykonos have been painting houses white for centuries, Los Angeles painted a million square feet of its heat-trapping asphalt with reflective paint. And Purdue professor Xiulin Ruan and his students supercharged the idea and discovered ways to make a white so brilliant, it can reflect up to 98 percent of sunlight back into deep space and keep a surface up to 19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than its surroundings.Bill plants a tree in the name of his children, River and Olivia, in Colombia in 2023. – Julian Quinones/CNNJulian Quinones/CNNSeville is also reviving the use of qanats and windcatchers, 1,000-year-old Persian inventions that vent enough cool air from underground canals to lower the temperature of baking streets by 10 to 15 degrees. This $5 million investment, along with a “policy of shade” to extend awnings, tree plantings and drop-in cooling centers, is part of a specific campaign to save the cultural treasure known as charla al fresco — that delicious moment after sunset when grandmothers can pull their chairs together in courtyards for a “cool chat.”But maybe the best test to see if Homo sapiens are as savvy as camels and gentoo penguins is whether we use technology that already exists on store shelves to cool more efficiently, at a lower cost and with less pollution and grid-crashing demand for peaker-plant power.In 2018, the International Energy Agency found fans and air conditioners make up 20% of the total electricity used by buildings around the world, but not a single nation places minimum energy performance standards on cooling equipment that beat the efficiency of today’s readily available technology.“Don’t let the cold out!” my dad would bellow as I left the door wide open in an urgent need to play, but both of us were clueless that our dumb energy hog was already working harder because most American air conditioners lacked a common part with the unsexy name of “inverter.” We could control the fan speed on window units, swamp coolers, and split systems back in the day, but the coo …
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[mwai_chat context=”Let’s have a discussion about this article:nnEditor’s Note: Portions of this story appear in “.Sales of air-conditioned shirts and day- or weeklong heatstroke insurance policies are booming in Japan. Seville, Spain, became the first city to start naming heat waves like hurricanes, and after they appointed a chief heat officer, Miami, Los Angeles and Phoenix soon followed suit.As our kids get older, our cities will get brighter.While locals in places like Mykonos have been painting houses white for centuries, Los Angeles painted a million square feet of its heat-trapping asphalt with reflective paint. And Purdue professor Xiulin Ruan and his students supercharged the idea and discovered ways to make a white so brilliant, it can reflect up to 98 percent of sunlight back into deep space and keep a surface up to 19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than its surroundings.Bill plants a tree in the name of his children, River and Olivia, in Colombia in 2023. – Julian Quinones/CNNJulian Quinones/CNNSeville is also reviving the use of qanats and windcatchers, 1,000-year-old Persian inventions that vent enough cool air from underground canals to lower the temperature of baking streets by 10 to 15 degrees. This $5 million investment, along with a “policy of shade” to extend awnings, tree plantings and drop-in cooling centers, is part of a specific campaign to save the cultural treasure known as charla al fresco — that delicious moment after sunset when grandmothers can pull their chairs together in courtyards for a “cool chat.”But maybe the best test to see if Homo sapiens are as savvy as camels and gentoo penguins is whether we use technology that already exists on store shelves to cool more efficiently, at a lower cost and with less pollution and grid-crashing demand for peaker-plant power.In 2018, the International Energy Agency found fans and air conditioners make up 20% of the total electricity used by buildings around the world, but not a single nation places minimum energy performance standards on cooling equipment that beat the efficiency of today’s readily available technology.“Don’t let the cold out!” my dad would bellow as I left the door wide open in an urgent need to play, but both of us were clueless that our dumb energy hog was already working harder because most American air conditioners lacked a common part with the unsexy name of “inverter.” We could control the fan speed on window units, swamp coolers, and split systems back in the day, but the coo …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]
