okay, so here it goes. My aunt and uncle had an earth house in Michigan NY that was completely underground. It didn’t contribute to heating up the global temperature because it was completely underground. When it snowed, there was a white blanket over the top of their dwelling. Could this be the solution to the global warming phenomenon?
Please pay more attention to the Category you’re putting threads in. This is probably a FQ (Factual Questions) or IMHO (Opinions) thread.
Please do not submit 1 sentence OPs on the Straight Dope. Maybe indicate why your thinking about this? Did you read or hear something? You don’t need an essay, but we really appreciate at least a short paragraph.
I’ll move this thread to IMHO.
Actually I would expect tar roofs would be better than the kind of roof I have (some kind of shiny membrane on our more-or-less flat roof). Tar being dark absorbs heat, which gets radiated into the house or to just the immediate surroundings and dissipated. It may encourage people to use air conditioning more, but if they have properly ventilated attic spaces that shouldn’t be much of a problem. And on a cold but sunny winter day, that extra heat might be appreciated.
Did the house receive electricity that came from a coal plant? Did they drive gas-consuming vehicles? Did they purchase things made, packaged and transported by companies that did the same? Did any of the products they bought or consumed contribute to the deforestation of the planet?
Houses that are underground may well require both less heating and less cooling than aboveground houses; and I’d guess that would more than counter their need for more lighting. However, as @Munch said, that doesn’t mean that such houses don’t contribute at all to climate change. Plus which, some people would find them uninhabitable; and many areas don’t have suitable soil and water table conditions to allow them to be workable.
Sod roofs can be put on above-ground houses; and/or the roofs can be designed for the installation of roof gardens. This can be of benefit, but the buildings need to be designed for it, due to the weight; and upkeep is needed. A lot of the benefit is probably also in flood reduction, also; I don’t know how much there is from requiring less heating/cooling.
Roofs also can be, and often now are, made of materials and colors suitable to the climate – in northern areas an overall absorption of heat can be good, in southern areas reflection may be a better way to go. And/or they can be used for solar panels.
I don’t think we’re going to find a single “the solution” to global warming; I think we’re going to have to patch together a batch of different solutions, none of which will do it on their own (and most likely all of which won’t do it together, at this point, but which can at least reduce the problem; which is very much worth doing.) Paying attention to what we make our roofs out of can I expect be useful in combination with a whole lot of other things. Moving people underground may be useful in certain circumstances, but again it’s going to take more than that; especially considering that it’s probably only practical in limited cases, at least unless we manage to make things so terrible on the surface that “practical” takes on a whole new set of definitions.
No. It’s a solution to individual homeowner cooling energy consumption and energy costs, nothing more. If green roofs or cool roofs were used very extensively in any given locality, they could actually have some measurable effect on urban heat islands, but would have no meaningful effect on global average temperatures, which are driven by GHG forcings and solar insolation acting on all of the world’s land and water surfaces. Some of those surfaces – most notably in the Arctic – are undergoing reduced albedo (getting darker) due to reduced ice cover over millions of square miles of ocean.
I don’t know, I’d have to ask my grandpa.
That’s a big house!
Just a note, in case anyone is unclear why I was talking about tar roofs, the original OP was a question about tar roofs (which is still preserved in the thread title) and it was changed after my reply. I don’t know how or why this happened.
I’ll help you out - the answer Is “of course they did”. And if the answer is “no, they didn’t” then THAT is the solution, not putting sod on your roof.
Living underground doesn’t do much for the overall equation of global warming. It reduces a little bit of the footprint by reducing the necessary energy consumption from heating/AC, but doesn’t cut out any of the other stuff that are major contributors to the problem.
Roughly 20% of US energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stem from heating, cooling, and powering households https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1922205117
So if the underground house did not use Heating or AC then yes, absolutely, it is a great solution to global warming.
On the other hand, about 60% materials used in building a house goes just towards building the basement https://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/large-carbon-footprint-of-new-house-construction-mostly-due-to-concrete-basements/
So building an underground house will require the use of more energy (and hence more global warming) than needed to build an aboveground house.