The Worst Greenhouse Gas You’ve Never Heard Of
August 4th, 2009
It’s ten thousand times worse that carbon dioxide, and it’s sitting in your refrigerator. HFCs were designed to be an ‘environmentally friendly’ alternative to the ozone-hole creating CFCs in our air conditioners and fridges.
Joining host Mike Tidwell to discuss how the White House is holding closed-door meetings that may result in HFCs becoming a bargaining chip on the worldwide carbon market is David Sassoon, the editor of the website Solve Climate.
Joining the conversation is Kert Davies of Greenpeace to discuss a safe alternative to HFCs — that are banned by the EPA.
A DC lobbying group forged anti-climate letters – pretending to be grassroots African-American and Hispanic non-profits groups in Virginia. Tim Freilich is a board member of Creciendo Junto, one of the groups whose identity was stolen. Joining the conversation to speak about and other coal company subterfuge is Jeff Biggers, the author of the book The United States of Appalachia.
TV weathermen could be a force for educating the public about the connections between our weather and climate change, but instead they’re often high-profile climate deniers. Joe Romm, editor of the website Climate Progress, discusses the lack of progress on the nightly news.
Image used with permission from listener Eric Crowley via Flickr. Thank you Eric!
Music for this edition of Earthbeat is the song ‘Sweeping’ from The Devil Makes Three.
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August 8th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Re: the hostility of weather people to climate science:
The biggest organization of weather types in the US, the American Meteorological Society, gave, according to them, “the highest honor that the Society can bestow upon an atmospheric scientist” to Jim Hansen this year. So they can’t all be planet killing neanderthals.
On HFCs: I was an ozone campaigner in the late 1980s, and it was clear then that the substitutes for CFCs were going to have significant global warming potential. Professor Tom Wigley circulated a good paper at the Changing Atmosphere conference in 1988. The figures were easily available from agencies such as Environment Canada (I am Canadian). The EPA is listing them, as is the IPCC. Compare with the statement of your guest that the chemical companies somehow succeeded in hiding or keeping the facts out of the public eye until now.
It is good if people are taking the rest of the greenhouse gases more seriously though. CO2 is on center stage because to deal with it is so much more difficult than any of the other gases. I think the recent concern about HFCs is one more indicator that the US concern over CO2 will last this time. As people screw themselves up to take on the daunting task of limiting CO2 emissions, naturally it is easy to get attention for gases that will be easier to deal with that also have significant effects. One thing about HFCs is they tend to have far shorter lifetimes in the atmosphere than CO2. Another is that the significance of HFCs to the economy is miniscule compared to that of fossil fuel.
PS global warming potential per molecule can be understood more easily if you consider that each gas retards radiation leaving the planetary system in a different wavelength. So if the gas under consideration has never been part of the atmosphere before, like HFC, each molecule added stops a wavelength of heat that has never been stopped before. So each new molecule of the new gas is calculated to have these fantastic sounding figures, like 10,000 times worse than CO2, because there are a lot of CO2 molecules out there already stopping a lot of the heat leaving the system at the CO2 wavelength. It isn’t that the individual HFC molecule is that much more efficient, it is that there are diminishing returns for each additional molecule the more of each type there are and as yet there aren’t that many HFC molecules out there.
PPS: Refrigerants work because they can be compressed into a liquid which boils at a temperature below the one you are interested in achieving. When the liquid boils, the phase change removes heat from the vicinity. So you compress in one place, move the liquid to the place you want to cool, and let it boil there, capture the vapour, recompress, and you’ve got a refrigerator. The greenhouse gas properties are a separate thing: some refrigerants have significant global warming potential, and others, such as those in the Greenpeace fridge, don’t. One of your guests seemed to think that because they were refrigerants, they were greenhouse gases.
September 6th, 2009 at 10:32 am
The previous refrigerant, i.e. CFC-11, which the HFCs were developed to replace, were worse. But this question of the global warming effect of gases other than CO2 is important. Here’s Sherwood Rowland, discoverer of ozone depletion, commenting on the effect on climate of phasing out CFC-11:
“In 1975, …Ramanathan pointed out that there would be a global warming effect from the CFCs. That’s been one of the fallouts about the Montreal Protocol, it is that in fact, that the banning of the CFCs under the Montreal Protocol has had more effect on global warming than any of the efforts so far under the Kyoto Protocol….”
Sherwood Rowland quoted on Australian Broadcasting Corp, “Science Show”, podcast 2009-09-05