Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2 216
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Suzanne Goldenberg writes at The Guardian that researchers at the University of Toronto's department of chemistry have identified a newly discovered greenhouse gas, perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), in use by the electrical industry since the mid-20th century, that is 7,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth. 'We claim that PFTBA has the highest radiative efficiency of any molecule detected in the atmosphere to date,' says Angela Hong. Concentrations of PFTBA in the atmosphere are low – 0.18 parts per trillion in the Toronto area – compared to 400 parts per million for carbon dioxide but PFTBA is long-lived. There are no known processes that would destroy or remove PFTBA in the lower atmosphere so it has a very long lifetime, possibly hundreds of years, and is destroyed in the upper atmosphere. 'It is so much less than carbon dioxide, but the important thing is on a per molecule basis, it is very very effective in interacting with heat from the Earth.' PFTBA has been in use since the mid-20th century for various applications in electrical equipment, such as transistors and capacitors. 'PFTBA is just one example of an industrial chemical that is produced but there are no policies that control its production, use or emission,' says Hong. 'It is not being regulated by any type of climate policy.'"
Meanwhile in russia (Score:0, Insightful)
millions of tons of methane are being dumped into the atmosphere thanks to Gazoprom's leaking pipelines.... Yet no one gives a hoot because Russia is good while America and their SUVs continue to be targeted by the rest of the jealous world....
Orders of magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory xckd
http://xkcd.com/558/ [xkcd.com]
0.18 PPT vs 400 PPM
0.18 PPT vs 400000000 PPM
0.00000018 PPM vs 400 PPM
One of them is deceptive, the other 2 provide proper context. Even being 7000 times more powerful doesn't make up for 6 orders of magnitude in concentration.
Bucky quote (Score:5, Insightful)
"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
Re:Concentrations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Concentrations (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there are no known processes by which PFTBA is broken down or removed from the atmosphere. So the effect is basically cumulative.
The other thing is that atmospheric concentrations are already in the 0.18 ppt range. CO2 is about 2,000,000 times more concentrated at the moment, at least in the Toronto area. This means that CO2 still has around 300 times the impact [ballpark figure based on numbers in the article], but if we keep up PTFBA production it could potentially start to be significant.
"The easy things first" makes sense, but "easy things" and "hard things" aren't always mutually exclusive. And frankly, PTFBA reduction is probably much closer to "easy thing" than CO2 reduction is.
per-molecule isn't really the issue though (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a number of gases that are more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The issue with carbon dioxide isn't that it has a particularly extreme greenhouse-gas effect, but the combination of two things: 1) it is a somewhat potent greenhouse gas; and 2) we are releasing a huge amount of it at pretty incredible industrial scales. Not a little bit here and there in obscure industrial processes, but through things like coal power plants that literally burn 100 to 200 train cars' worth of coal per day (a typical train car fits ~100 tonnes of coal). The scale is actually pretty impressive, in an old-school, 19th-century industrialism sort of way. The sheer volume of coal these plants burn is such that just keeping it coming regularly is a logistical challenge, and there's a whole industry around technology to unload these 100-car trains in few enough hours that you can get the next one in.
The short of it is that [potency x volume] is the basic issue. Very potent but miniscule releases aren't that important, though it's worth keeping on eye on them.
Meanwhile, back on planet Bureaucrat... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Meanwhile in russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet no one gives a hoot because Russia is good while America and their SUVs continue to be targeted by the rest of the jealous world....
"Russia is good"? Who the fuck said that? Talk about paranoia...
global warming is not the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is overpopulation. The solution to which is pretty simple: stop shitting out kids.
Global warming is just a symptom, or might be mother nature's way of fixing the problem. Although its long term effects are far less predictable than the weather tomorrow. (Which seems either impossible, or all climate scientists and meteorologists suck.)
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:2, Insightful)
The other product of combustion. It may not persist, but we sure put a lot of it in the air on a continuous basis. It probably won't cause a snowball effect, but it does help to explain the "pause" in warming over the last 15 years--the world hasn't grown much during that time on a net basis, and lots of places are actually shrinking.
Re:global warming is not the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
A large portion of the population would go completely insane if we instituted reproductive limits.
When conservatives lose their shit completely over not being able to buy a jumbo cup of carbonated sugar-water or poison themselves with trans-fats, you know they're going to go totally bonkers if you tell them they can't have five kids. The more ignorant Americans even lost their minds over the first lady's eat-healthy initiative. Too many Americans are just too selfish and aggressively ignorant to ever do what's right, and I don't expect people anywhere else to be much better.
Re:Concentrations (Score:4, Insightful)
and condenses at most earth temperatures.
This is the key point. You can't just pump more and more water vapor into the atmosphere. There's an upper limit; once you hit the limit, it condenses and falls out as rain. So you won't get runaway warming just from H2O.
But there is a secondary effect that should be noted: hotter air can hold more water vapor. So as the atmosphere warms from CO2, it can hold more water, which is a greenhouse gas, and it warms even more. It's not a feedback effect, but it is an amplification effect.
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:4, Insightful)
You people should try reading a book once in a while.
The water vapor problem is relatively minor because water vapor also causes cloud formation, which offsets the warming effect because it reflects light back into space. The science is still being settled about whether water vapor has even a positive or negative effect on the climate. They have studied it, but the situation is complex.
Also, the idea that global warming has stopped over the last 15 years has been debunked time and time again. It's a result of dishonest people taking an exceptionally warm year (1998, which remains the third hottest year on record) and drawing a line to a less exceptional year or even an exceptionally cold year (2008, usually) in an effort to mislead people into thinking that global warming has stopped or even is reversing.
The climate is cyclical due to El Nino effects, the solar cycle, and so on, so this is incredibly ill conceived. A running five year average is a better way to go, though given that the solar cycle is about 11 years, even that isn't perfect.
The earth has continued to warm. The last five years have shown a slight pause because of a couple of slightly colder years, but there's no reason to believe this is anything other than a temporary slowing. The long term graphs, especially if you include all of the 20th century, clearly show the earth is warming, and continues to warm.
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:3, Insightful)