Dark surfaces absorb more light, and heat up faster.
In “improving” Washington DC’s fabled reflecting pond, Trump hired flunkies that painted the bottom a dark shade of blue, and covered it with a coating meant for pick up truck beds. I’m not joking.
It’s basic high school physics, but a key factor in climate science, especially related to “feedback” effects that amplify the warming influence of carbon dioxide.
It was the whole rationale behind the Dark Snow Project, the international science effort that brought me to Greenland the first time with Glaciologist Jason Box some 13 years ago this week. Jason’s idea was that, since darker surfaces absorb more heat – dark materials like soot from wildfires must be having an effect on the Greenland Ice sheet, where particles from far flung forest fires in the Northern Hemisphere gather in and darken large areas of otherwise dazzling white ice.
White ice reflects 90 percent of all incoming light.
Dark ice absorbs much more.
The same effect is a powerful factor as Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice disappears, revealing dark sea water underneath, which absorbs heat rapidly.
Decades ago, Scientists James Lovelock and Lynne Margulis imagined a simple model of a world dominated by two forms of life, white daisies, and black daisies, making the case for how physical and biological processes could, on their own, provide a regulating influence on a planetary system.
Thinking about large systems in a way that recognizes physics and fact, is one of the foundations of the enlightenment that inspired America’s Founders.
It’s those exact big ideas that are under attack by MAGA Republicans, and that stench from the Capitol reflecting pool is the perfect manifestation of the rotten results.