Neighborhoods with more trees and green space stay cooler, while those coated with layers of asphalt swelter. Lower-income neighborhoods tend to be hottest, a city report found, and they have the least tree canopy.
The same is true in cities across the country, where poor and minority neighborhoods disproportionately suffer the consequences of rising temperatures. Research shows the temperatures in a single city, from Portland, Oregon, to Baltimore, can vary by up to 20 degrees. For a resident in a leafy suburb, a steamy summer day may feel uncomfortable. But for their friend a few neighborhoods over, it’s more than uncomfortable — it’s dangerous.
Trees are a good thing? Who knew?
Not like they’ve been part of the ecosystem for
billionshundreds of millions of years or anything.More like 375 million years, about the middle Devonian period.
Tangentally: for millions of years after plants started using lignin as a structural material the decomposers couldn’t break it down very effectively, so for like 60 million years lots of that tough plant material stacked up into deep layers and eventually turned into coal.
Subscribe.
But car drivers crash into them and hurt themselves sometimes or birds perch and poop on cars. Not worth having trees /s
If you live some place in a drought, water is an issue when planting new trees.
Build covers with solar panels on their roofs. Provide shade and generate money in the long run. Most brick-and-mortar shoppers would be more attracted to covered parking, too.
It blows my mind that an article about shade deserts doesn’t mention covering with solar collection systems. We all should expect anything intended to take sunlight should be a photovoltaic surface.
An increase in the number of solar cells in an area can be useful, but shade cover from trees would have a greater cooling effect on most areas. Trees both shade and provide transpiration cooling. The water evaporating from leaves cools the surrounding air as the water goes from a liquid to gas phase.
I really hope Biden pushes something next term that allows promotes solar like the current ev push.
Even better, ban HoAs from banning solar. Fuck that noise.
Removed by mod
Pv is now around $30/m^2 wholesale and $60/m^2 retail.
Not much more expensive than a sheet metal roof (far cheaper than a mature tree after all the water and tending), but a sheet metal roof doesn’t produce $100/yr worth of electricity.
Tree good. If can’t afford tree, then pv obvious choice.
It would cost about $30,000 for us to do solar cells and battery. That’s more than my car cost.
Removed by mod
You can buy the panels, inverter, racking and a battery which produces more than enough for anything smaller than a mansion for <$10k. Batteries are also not really necessary and can be added later.
Why are you paying > $20k for someone to put in 60 screws and a piece of conduit?
For one thing, that’s not what I’ve seen in terms of pricing overall. For another, believe it or not, not all of us are able to do things like install solar panels on a roof.
Wild concept: It’s possible to offer a fair price to someone who can. You don’t need to pay $20k for one day’s labour (although you probably do need to pay about $1k for an hour for a licensed electrician to inspect and do the final hookup if you want to AC feed for winter and cloudy days). You do not need to pay $1/W or wait years for grid tie if you have a battery and size for self consumption.
Given how thoroughly ripped off you are and how dismissive you are of the price people in civilised countries consider normal, I’ll assume you’re in the US. Signature solar sell panels for 31c/W hybrid off-grid inverters for $2k and batteries for $280/kWh. You can probably do better if you look around and don’t just listen to the door to door MLM scammers.
Again, the prices you are giving me are not the prices I have been seeing.
And I wasn’t dismissive of anything. I was talking about my personal experience. Which you are dismissing.
And even if you’re right, I can’t afford $10,000 either.
You’re just spreading propaganda.
If you don’t personally want a thing then just shut up rather than polluting a discussion about a completely different use case.
Removed by mod
I live in a nice, heavily treed neighborhood. I always dress wrong, cause it gets so much hotter once I get into the city and open areas.
One of the biggest shocks moving from the midwest to Los Angeles wasn’t the palm trees, it was that there were so few shade trees.
Sure, there were some shady neighborhoods, and there was the very shady Griffith park, but overall, almost no shade. It was nuts.
Gotta make life tough on those homeless.people. /s
I was rock climbing yesterday on a rockface getting pounded by the sun on a 90° day the entire day I felt sick, tired, and drank a shitton of water and it was not enough. People should value the shade.
Gotta keep your electrolytes up too. I learned that one the hard way. You don’t need to do that in an office, you do when its 110 degrees in the shade and doing physical activities.
