And why can’t we plant them on the streets…? How is ren ai lu in summer? any cooler ?
I believe you could paint the street a certain color to reflect the sun back or something.
But literally 90% of the hot in the summer is from the sunlight. It’s why people often have umbrella in the sun, it’s not because people are afraid of a tan, they’re afraid of heat. But a massive thunderstorm drops the temp by about 8 degrees at least.
But supposedly painting the roof green would also lessen the heat, basically anything but black or grey.
We’re already painting the sidewalk green, might as well just paint the entire street green. You should note most those sheet metal roofing are green but the building isn’t any less hot.
OK I am going to speak out about this. Many mornings I ride along a scorching hot treeless stretch of Roosevelt Road to get to work. As I cut into Zhoushan Road (a shortcut for me), lined with trees, it’s amazing how much cooler and more comfortable it is. It’s obvious that having tree cover helps compared to having vast treeless expanses of concrete.
Guy
Ok great, confirmation. I’m sure they’d help with the pollution aswell.
Get that garlic nosed tosser on the blower and tell him to plant some trees and do something useful with his life instead of sucking off that jenson AI guy.
They’re just large roads like Zhongshan N Rd and Renai Rd that have trees. Most the other streets are simply too narrow for practical shade trees. I mean the city already plants plenty of shade trees around. Yes it makes a huge difference.
I just wonder if it’s more practical for narrower streets to simply just stretch nets/cloth between buildings?
Roosevelt Road, which I mentioned immediately above, is a vast sea of concrete.
But please don’t let facts like that slow you down.
Guy
So why don’t they plant trees in the middle of Roosevelt Rd?
You’d have to ask the officials in Taipei City Hall why they think this kind of monstrous sea of concete is a plus. 
Guy
I disagree with that. Taiwan has loads of wide roads. The alleys are narrow though sure, but main roads are big.
I mean painting the road a lighter color will probably help, I think.
But for narrower streets they could possibly just stretch reflective nets/cloth over it between buildings? I’d say it’s about 10 meters between building in those streets. Problem is they’d be a huge pain during typhoons and can cause accidents/damage.
Those newer buildings make the problem worse. The old gongyu at least have arcades that provide shade. The new buildings have absolutely zero arcade/shade area at all. It’s like they’re designed to cause maximum suffering.
So what do you intend to do about this? Knock it all down and start again?
Cities by their nature are heat islands. There are a lot of things you can do - theoretically - to mitigate this, but as per the climate change thread, governments have precisely zero intention of doing any of those things, in favour of gee-whiz stuff that attracts lots of funding and ultimately makes the problem worse. Realistically, it’s better to accept that cities are a lost cause, and focus on non-urban areas where opportunities are greater, costs are lower (much lower) and results are likely to be better. Again, though, governments are hell-bent on making life miserable for urban dwellers while completely ignoring all the possibilities out in the sticks. Country bumpkins are simply not an important voter demographic.
Politicians drive their personal cars where the issue with heat is not an issue for them. If heat becomes an issue where electricity supply becomes an issue, just issue rules like “run your AC at 28 degrees” or some such nonsense.
Only way to deal with it is with a lot of water, shade, or something.
There is an element of “Khymer Rouge” Year Zero’ism in a lot of green initiatives. Start from scratch–the masses just don’t understand, etc. etc. Sound familiar?
The 15-minute cities essentially being reversed engineered “send them to the countryside” sort of re-education. Bizarre and scary as any fanaticism is.
You need to zoom in on the image to look at the scale. As is usual with this sort of thing, it’s been colourized for dramatic effect and it’s quite hard to infer what’s actually going on. The parameter being measured is “temperature anomaly”, i.e., average temperature over the stated three years compared to the 1960-2014 average. Leaving aside the rather curious premise that 1960-2014 has a meaningful average (perhaps they did something a bit more sophisticated than I’m suggesting) the “anomaly” indicated is extremely small - fractions of a degree. The scale is too blurred to make out, but it looks like central Taipei is something on the order of 0.5’C hotter than it was ten years ago. Note that 2009-2012 is hotter than the baseline (1960-2014) despite the overlap, presumably because the baseline reference is dominated by Taiwan’s pre-industrial past.
In any case - to answer your question - the point is not so much the vegetation but changes in albedo in the urban areas. There definitely have been more buildings going up over the last decade on ‘green’ sites, even if it’s hard to see. The main problem, I would guess, is that urban heat islands suffer from a sort of positive-feedback issue; as it gets hotter, people are more inclined to pump heat out of their buildings (with aircon), which makes the environment even hotter, and aircon load increases … and so on.
I can see the difference in the heat maps, but not in the satellite maps, so I’m not sure what point is being made.
The temperature differences are visually exaggerated in the heat maps in order to create a compelling image. There undoubtedly are changes in the cityscape that are hard to spot in the image, but the temperature rise is not as dramatic as it looks. The numbers involved are so small, there’s also the possibility that it’s a statistical artifact - since we can’t see what calculations were done, it’s hard to tell.
Sure, I understand all that. I would like to know what differences there have been on the ground in Linkou, however.
Yes, it would certainly be interesting to know if the authors have identified specific causal factors - increased use of energy (particularly aircon), increase or changes in traffic, changes in albedo due to construction, etc.
I have a feeling that the satellite images in the left panels are just there to show the geography and make the meaning of the right panels clearer… and maybe fill in some white space on the landscape orientation of the slide.
I also don’t see any readily apparent difference in green space* between the two satellite images. Actually, I’m surprised that things haven’t changed more over the course of a decade, though I suppose the mountains here constrain how much cities can grow.
I think the information is presented poorly or without sufficient context though if the author wants to make a point about declining green space, presumably because it’s a tweet where the author had to choose just one slide. Showing those satellite images as a part of a tweet kind of makes you think you should be able to see a clear difference between them… and there isn’t one.
[* I think they normally calculate this by classifying each grid square at whatever resolution as “vegetation” or “industrial” or “residential” etc. Maybe there is less green in the later image according to that classification, but it would need to be supported by the results and I agree the images alone don’t provide enough information to demonstrate that. I did look if the tweet author had provided a link to a paper, but apparently it’s just the one slide. 
]
I’ve reached out to Professor Shih for clarification. If she is gracious enough to reply, I’ll post the details.
Meanwhile, additional reports are appearing on urban heat island effects, this time from a research team at National Cheng Kung University:
Guy