News bits: Anti-climate change paint invented!; Climate changing the ocean; Etc.

The NYT reports about a new white paint that is highly reflective of sunlight:

Xiulin Ruan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, didn’t set out to make it into the Guinness World Records when he began trying to make a new type of paint. He had a loftier goal: to cool down buildings without torching the Earth.

In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside buildings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

In 2021, Guinness declared it the whitest paint ever, and it’s since collected several awards. While the paint was originally envisioned for rooftops, manufacturers of clothes, shoes, cars, trucks and even spacecraft have come clamoring. Last year, Dr. Ruan and his team announced that they’d come up with a more lightweight version that could reflect heat from vehicles.

“We weren’t really trying to develop the world’s whitest paint,” Dr. Ruan said in an interview. “We wanted to help with climate change, and now it’s more of a crisis, and getting worse. We wanted to see if it was possible to help save energy while cooling down the Earth.”

This is really good news. Really good. The reflective, opaque white material is hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) nano particles, mostly tiny flat platelets. 

hBN platelet chemical structure

It is a low-toxicity, biocompatible compound used in drug delivery and tissue scaffolding to help regenerate damaged living tissue. Even better, the solvent for the reflective hBN is dimethylformamide or DMF. It appears to be a non-carcinogen and a fairly low toxicity solvent and apparently it does not bioaccumulate in the environment.

The original paint was thick (left) and required a layer 0.4 millimeters thick to achieve sub-ambient radiant cooling. The new formulation can achieve similar cooling with a layer just 0.15 millimeters thick, which is thin and light enough for its radiant cooling effects to be applied to vehicles like cars, trains and airplanes.

Image of the flat platelets of hBN

from 2022 research paper

This stuff is ~98% reflective!

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The NYT reports about ocean waters around Florida: 

How Hot Is the Sea Off Florida Right Now? 

Think 90s Fahrenheit

Researchers are recording ocean temperatures that pose severe risks to coral reefs and other marine life

Florida’s coral reefs are facing what could be an unprecedented threat from a marine heat wave that is warming the Gulf of Mexico, pushing water temperatures into the 90s Fahrenheit.

The biggest concern for coral isn’t just the current sea surface temperatures in the Florida Keys, even though they are the hottest on record. The daily average surface temperature off the Keys on Monday was just over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or 32.4 Celsius, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The real worry, scientists say, is that it’s only July. Corals typically experience the most heat stress in August and September.

This much worse than the bit about the white paint. 🥺

Qs: What should one say to a person who denies or downplays the reality of global warming, climate change and attendant environmental damage, e.g., species extinctions, and human damage, e.g., deaths from heat exposure? Just call them names, like idiot, jackass, stupid, flat out wrong and/or deluded? Or, try to respectfully reason with them by pointing out facts and hoping you don't get dismissed as a tyrannical socialist, alarmist liar? Or, try to see if there's any aspect of global warming that they think might be of some concern and work with that?

Should the onus of being respectful, reasonable and fact-grounded be on the reality believer, the reality denier, both or neither?

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The NYT reports about America's demagogic, authoritarian radical right's intention to ramp up culture wars beyond the ridiculous point they are already at:

Hard Right Presses Culture War Fights on 

Defense Bill, Imperiling Passage

Right-wing Republicans want to use the annual military budget and policy legislation, traditionally a bipartisan affair, as a tool to pick fights on abortion and other social issues

Hard-right House Republicans are pushing to use the yearly bill that sets the United States military budget and policy as an opportunity to pick fights with the Biden administration over abortion, race and transgender issues, imperiling its passage and the decades-old bipartisan consensus in Congress around backing the Pentagon.

Republican leaders have scheduled votes beginning on Wednesday on the $886 billion measure, but as of Tuesday evening, they had yet to dissuade their ultraconservative colleagues from efforts to load it up with politically charged provisions to combat what the G.O.P. calls “wokeness” in the military.

The GOP wants an anti-woke military. Great. The radicalized Republican Party has gone from ridiculous speed stupid politics to plaid ludicrous speed idiotic politics:

Plaid ludicrous speed idiocy = 

the idiotic but viciously authoritarian Republican Party