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.'"
Concentrations (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, lots of things have a stronger absorption profile than CO2, CH4 is one, but if it even has a hundred thousandth of the emission levels of carbon dioxide, I'd be pretty surprised.
Still: fix the easy things first.
Re:Concentrations (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Concentrations (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you just randomly combine numbers? Your math has nothing to do with anything.
Even at 7000 times stronger for PFTBA, the PFTBA would be equivalent to
.00000018 * 7000 = 0.00126 parts per million of carbon, which is
.00126 / 400 = 0.00000315, or 0.000315 percent of the effect of the CO2.
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It appears that some of us also have a problem with english.
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.
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Math fail. Should be:
CO2 is 2,000,000,000 more concentrated so it has 300,000 times the impact. Point still stands though, to some degree.
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Good point. When you consider that, the proportion of anthropogenic warming accounted for by PFTBA would be higher.
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Well, there are no known processes by which PFTBA is broken down or removed from the atmosphere. So the effect is basically cumulative.
We're talking about Florinert [wikipedia.org] here, which many geeks have actually heard of, unlike the acronym PTFBA. It costs more than $100 a pound. I strongly doubt anybody is spraying this stuff all over the place like hairspray.
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Yes, but water vapor affects albedo positively, and condenses at most earth temperatures.
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.
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Doesn't it count as a feedback effect even if the constant is such that it cannot run away on its own? After all, the increased warming due to wetter air leads to even wetter air.
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i'm very glad to see you understand equilibrium. Now all you have to do is realize it works for CO2 as well.
Cowardice, reliable predictor of stupidity.
It doesn't matter if the system will eventually reach equilibrium if it takes a gigantic shit on us before it equalizes.
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.
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This is all that needs to be said about this article.
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400000000 PPM should have said 400000000 PPT
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0.00000018 PPM * 700 Rh = 0.00126 Rh/PPM
400 PPM * 1 Rh - 400 = Rh/PPM
So even though PFTBA is affecting heat about 1/8000 as much as CO2 -- numbers like that add up.
We only need 7,999 more existential threats from obscure gases to kill us off in a fiery/warm deathly Armageddon of doom. You've been warned.
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It's great to see these two comments stacked on top of each other:
Agreed. Basically, if all of this new gas was emitted during the past 50 years, it would take more than 300 centuries (!) for it to achieve the same warming effect as CO2 now (in Toronto at least).
Directly above:
Yes, Mr Genius, let's wait until the concentrations are equivalent before worrying about it
Nobody ever said it was the biggest problem in the world. But it can and probably will be at some point, so we should start investigating now before it's a real problem.
In 300 centuries we'll either be off of this rock or we'll be able to deploy nano-bots that take care of this problem for us. Or we'll all be dead from something else I guess.
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Actually there is a mostly climate science conference going on right now in San Fransisco, CA. The 2013 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting [agu.org] has more than 22,000 people in attendance and is generally the largest gathering of the climate science community yearly. I've been hearing some fascinating stories out of it.
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
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If that quote is accurate, Mr. Fuller was mistaken.
Pollution is allowed to happen because harvesting the resources represented would cost grossly more than they are worth.
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If that quote is accurate, Mr. Fuller was mistaken.
Pollution is allowed to happen because harvesting the resources represented would cost grossly more than they are worth.
Too often, however, the "worth" is computed by the bean-counters merely by clean-up costs to the company and not on the costs to the rest of us.
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"Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."
And yet, it's been conclusively proven that Tywin's shit is NOT gold. So somebody misoverestimated its value.
Can this be weaponized by mad dictator? (Score:2)
Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'.
Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a
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Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'. Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a lot more'?
Only a bond villain would do this considering the stuff costs in the neighborhood of $100 a pound.
Concentrations of PFTBA in the atmosphere are low (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but if it's 7000 times more powerful, than 0.18 parts * 7000 means 1260 parts per trillion compared to 400 parts per... oh wait, million? Who's to blame for this bullshit comparison, the University of Toronto or The Guardian? I guess no answer is needed on that one.
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.
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And burning 100 tonnes of coal will produce about 256 tonnes of CO2 (assuming the coal is 70% carbon).
Methane should be the priority (Score:2)
Methane is 20x more powerful at trapping heat than CO2, and also it recycles out of the atmosphere in just 12 years.
Maybe we should do something to reduce the billions of methane machines in the world (cows, pigs, etc). Not only would there not exist billions of these animals without human interference, many of these farm animals produce an abnormal amount of methane due to their crappy, corn-fed diet.
Humans gotta eat, but there are healthier options out there than corn fed farm animals (for both us, and th
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yes and no. methane is pretty short lived in the atmosphere because in areas with sufficient sunlight and water vapor, hydroxyl radicals are created which help break down methane into CO2.
of course, in areas like the poles where there's little water vapor and less solar insolation, methane tends to last a great deal longer. this is one of the reasons the north polar region is warming faster than any other place.
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well known problem (Score:2)
All Tomorrow's Excuses (Score:2)
Remember how we went through the process of removing CFCs from production and usage (by and large) because of the ozone holes?
It didn't stop the greenhouse effect overall, though, did it? Because sufficient impetus wasn't given to citizens or to governments to avoid expelling greenhouse gases. Especially when it's an issue of what's coming out of your whip cream canister, it gives you little reason to put thought behind that next cut of steak you're going to put that whip cream onto.
Here's just another gas
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You do realize that the 'ozone hole' issue has nothing to do with global warming, don't you? Because we stopped most use of CFCs the annual ozone hole is reducing in size each year as the chemical finally degrades. This is a good thing, especially for people who live at high altitudes. Most CFCs also happen to be greenhouse gasses, but that wasn't the reason their production and use was curtailed.
Newly Discovered? (Score:3)
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1283/ [xkcd.com]
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The gas isn't newly discovered, its greenhouse properties are. Apparently no one ever bothered to measure them before.
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: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.
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Instead of telling people they can't have kids or trying to punish them if they do, why not offer them incentives?
I can think of two ways to approach this, short-term (long-term implantable contraceptives) and long-term (sterilization).
On the short-term side, you could offer a cash payment for any woman willing to use an implantable birth control device. Subdermal implants last for three years, some IUDs as long as five years.
On the long-term side, you could offer a more substantial payment for vasectomies
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The problem is overpopulation. The solution to which is pretty simple: stop shitting out kids.
What part of the world do you live in? That doesn't happen here.
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The problem is overpopulation. The solution to which is pretty simple: stop shitting out kids.
Yeah except that with our current farming methods and land use, we have plenty of room. And if we use some of the more fertile places in the world just for food production instead of turning food into fuel, we could easily support another 3 billion, and upwards of 7 billion people.
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that you're also an ardent environmentalist? And with that, you have strong Malthusian leanings.
Newly Discovered? (Score:2)
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1283/ [xkcd.com]
Literally, my first thought reading the headline (Score:5, Funny)
Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2
... emitted whenever a politician speaks.
-
Science by press release? (Score:2)
Nothing to fear from PFTBA (Score:2)
Until of course, someone renames it. Nobody can possible be afraid of a news story about PFTBA. If you call it "Electrical Insulation Gas of Heat Death" -- well, then, that should do it.
AKA "Fluorinert", the stuff used to cool old Crays (Score:2)
and used by a few overclockers with full-immersion cooling systems.
Re:Meanwhile in russia (Score:4, Interesting)
Fracking wells here in the U.S. have similar leakage rates. Methane is bad news, and a huge chunk of pre-life fireball era earth's atmosphere was methane.
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Oooooooops, I accidentally implied that methane caused that. That makes me look really dumb. Please be aware that this was just poor communication, not poor understanding.
Billions are larger than millions (Score:5, Informative)
millions of tons of methane are being dumped into the atmosphere thanks to Gazoprom's leaking pipelines....
That is undoubtably true. However, billions of tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere.
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....
While methane does have a higher infrared cross-section than carbon dioxide, it is not that much higher; it also has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime. While it's useful to address both, it makes to address more attention on the larger factor, and not the smaller.
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:5, Informative)
While methane does have a higher infrared cross-section than carbon dioxide, it is not that much higher;
http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html [epa.gov] Methane is about 20x more effective than CO2 at greenhouse warming over the period of 100 years. I personally think a 20x increase is more than "not much higher".
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:5, Informative)
I personally think a 20x increase is more than "not much higher".
First, my statement was that it is not that much higher. Eliminating the word "that" changes the meaning of the sentence, since the the topic was the difference between millions and billions.
Second, the infrared absorption of methane is about 21 times higher than that of carbon dioxide. However, the atmospheric lifetime is 12 years, compared to estimates of between 50 and 200 years for carbon dioxide. So it is not true that "methane is about 20x more effective than CO2 at greenhouse warming over the period of 100 years". It is about 20x more effective than CO2 over a period of about 12 years, but drops exponentially to zero after that. (That's expressed per molecule. It's higher if expressed per unit mass emitted, since methane is so much lighter than carbon dioxide.)
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While it's true that methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide it's also true that the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is a bit less than 2 ppm whereas the concentration of CO2 is ~400 ppm, a factor of 200.
Re:Billions are larger than millions (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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Oh for fucks sake.
Water vapour is a potent GHG but we don't need to worry about it. Why? Any water vapour produced by man is a [drumroll] drop in the ocean. [rimshot]. Thanks for coming, I'll be here all week, try the veal.
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True, but emitting more water into the atmosphere generally does not increase overall water content of the air significantly. If you do not change the temperature, the water will just fall back out. If you do increase the temperature, the air tends to find a way to gather more humidity, whether you add any deliberately or not.
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At the same time if we could do something to deliberately reduce the water vapor in the atmosphere it would quickly get replaced by evaporation. A number of years ago an atmospheric scientist did a thought experiment about what would happen if you could remove 100% of the water vapor from the atmosphere. He calculated it would take at most 60-70 days for water vapor levels to return to normal because of evaporation from the oceans.
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Compared to the amount of water vapor evaporated into the air from the ocean's surface (70%+ of the surface) human emissions of water vapor are a rounding error. Any excess water vapor in the atmosphere is quickly precipitated out. It's just not a factor.
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The EPA's "global warming potential" equivalency factors include a value for residence time in the atmosphere. The IR spectrum for water vapor is irrelevant as its residence time is (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/ali1/
Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential [wikipedia.org]
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_vapor [wikipedia.org]
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wtf. Slasdot doesn't like "open parenthesis" followed by "less than". Anyhow:
The EPA's "global warming potential" equivalency factors include a value for residence time in the atmosphere. The IR spectrum for water vapor is irrelevant as its residence time (less than 10 days) is three orders of magnitude lower than CO2 (36,500 days, or 100 yrs).
See: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/ali1/ [stanford.edu]
Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Remember Michael Mann of the Climate Research Unit of the East Anglia University ...
Why should we take anything you say seriously when you make such and elementary error as that? Mann of course is at Penn State and before that at Virginia and has never been associated with the CRU.
More confusion of millions with billions (Score:3)
Millions of tons of various gas are dumped into the atmosphere daily as they rise from the crust of the Earth.
Once again, we see that slashdot aonymous cowards confuse millions with billions.
Volcanoes emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Humans emit billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html [usgs.gov]
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm [discovery.com]
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Pfft, what's a few orders of magnitudes between friends(or industry shills)?
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this was just poor communication, not poor understanding.
Amusing, given your name.
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hey the guy said he can reed, not ryt
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Wetland emissions come from decaying plant matter -- plant matter which had only recently been absorbed from the atmosphere to begin with. Therefore, wetlands are inherently carbon-netural.
(In reality, of course, it's more complicated: not all of the plant matter decays completely -- some of it eventually turns into coal or petroleum -- so wetlands are actually carbon sinks.)
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Prior to the oxygen crisis, there was plenty of life, as well.
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At least methane breaks down with a half life of about 20 years. CO2 will live eternally until it is absorbed by the ocean, or consumed by a plant.
It sounds like this stuff has no good mechanism to be taken out of the air.
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"Absorbed by the ocean" happens at a pretty rapid clip. With a bit of sanity, we could actually manage a net change of near zero carbon dioxide, but we've decided that unsustainable industrial growth is preferable.
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...
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It's called getting defensive and slipping in a freudian way.
Re:Until tomorrow? (Score:5, Informative)
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Remind me to stick with helium. But wait, we're running out of our reserves of that stuff.
"No fun allowed."
-Mother Nature
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My thoughts also. I'm still hoping we don't find any life on Mars so it can be terraformed.
Why should that stop us unless it's intelligent? Sorry about your luck, microbes. Multi-celled organisms coming through.
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Yeah, there's a mistake with your numbers. With those figures you're either trying to say that the US only has about 326 people in it or that website costs more money than the entire world has produced in the last 10 years.
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With those figures you're either trying to say that the US only has about 326 people in it
So I guess he meant to say per person that successfully signed up...
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Obama isn't even a fucking citizen.
Aaaaand any possible credibility, right out the window.
Re:That is what we need to terraform Mars! (Score:5, Informative)
That is exactly what we need to terraform Mars! We need to send few tonnes of this stuff to Mars....
A lot more than a "few tonnes", I'm afraid. I'll also point out that the formula for this is C12F27N-- it has a molecular mass of 671-- that's fifteen times more massive than carbon dioxide molecules. So, per unit MASS it's only 460 times more powerful an infrared absorber than carbon dioxide.
SF6 is a better infrared-trapping greenhouse gas for Mars.
Chemical info here, by the way: http://webbook.nist.gov/cgi/cbook.cgi?ID=C311897 [nist.gov]
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/content/dam/sigma-aldrich/structure1/050/mfcd00000436.eps/_jcr_content/renditions/large.png [sigmaaldrich.com]
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Plus there's actually international treaties against it.
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Yup. your new car will no longer be aloud to smell "like a new car"
That sounds terrible!
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..., that makes carbon dioxide 317,000 times more problematic than PFTBA. ...
AH HAH!! So, you admit PFTBA is a problem. Well, since when does a politician NOT solve a problem? When the solution is worse than the original problem? No, of course not. They're in the business of selling solutions.
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Sold by 3M under the trade name "Fluorinert FC-43". Used primarily as a heat transfer fluid in exotic electronics.
The best known application to Slashdotters would be the Cray 2 supercomputer, which used a fluorinert "waterfall" to remove waste heat from the densely packed electronics. Some overclockers use it on high performance gaming rigs and the like, with the entire motherboard submerged in a bath of the stuff.
Because of the very high dielectric strength and low RF loss, it was used as a cooling medium
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Except for the part where it's persistent and steadily, albeit very slowly, increasing and we have no idea how to counteract it once it's in the atmosphere...
Yeah, let's just wait until it's actually a problem before we start researching how to fix it. What could possibly go wrong?
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CO2 is pretty well mixed in the atmosphere with the maximum variation between different locations being on the order of 10 ppm. In general it is a bit higher in the Northern Hemisphere dropping some the further south you get. Here's a paper from 2000 titled The Natural Latitudinal Distribution of Atmospheric CO2 [anl.gov] that addresses the issue.