Slashdot Mirror
Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2
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.'"
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....
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.
Obligatory xckd
http://xkcd.com/558/
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.
When someone finds a new molecule 7,101 times more powerful and 0.181 parts per trillion in the atmosphere setting a new record?
Glad this has been discovered buthow soon can we get a new tax to reduce this new gas? Is it too late? Otherwise the climate will change even faster
If you're trying to improve system performance, targeting a component which accounts for 5 percent of response time can yield AT MOST a 5 percent overall improvement.
It's the same here, except we're talking about a percentage that is orders of magnitude smaller.
"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
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
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'?
Then this new substance could be used to warm up the martian atmosphere :)
That is exactly what we need to terraform Mars! We need to send few tonnes of this stuff to Mars, heat it up, heating up will cause out-gassing and densification of the atmosphere. In the long term we will need to somehow liberate the CO2 bonded in carbonate minerals, which have soaked up Martian atmosphere, but getting atmospheric pressure on Mars to say 0.1 bar would already make a lot of things easier.
0.18 parts per trillion in the Toronto area – compared to 400 parts per million for carbon dioxide
So carbon dioxide is 2.2 billion times more prevalent than PFTBA. Given the 7,000 figure, that makes carbon dioxide 317,000 times more problematic than PFTBA. Just providing some numerical clarification.
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.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I know it is reported that it is 400 ppm at 10,000 ft in Hawaii, I'm not sure it is equal all over the world though. A CO2 monitoring satellite will get launched in 2014 to give the real answer.
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
7000x the effectiveness of CO2, but 10^-9 as present in the atmosphere, with a long shelf life. We should track it, but it shouldn't require a policy yet, I think.
the government wastes three decades obsessed with studying the effects of cow farts on global warming.
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 the planet).
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
"The newly discovered gas, perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), has been in use by the electrical industry since the mid-20th century."
Did we not know we were using this in electronics since the mid 20th Century?
what's the point. Nobody's arresting oath breakers anymore. Obama isn't even a fucking citizen. Security clearances don't mean shit.
Hey did ya know that 750 million dollar healthfucked.gov site if the money was JUST GIVEN to citizens of the US, it would be 2.3 Million dollars for EACH MAN WOMAN AND CHILD!
Or how about Joeseph Biden and his help the ISRALIE holocause bullshit?
$800 million
with fucking BIDEN and HEALTHFRAUD.GOV alone US Citizens could have 4 million dollars EACH to spend!
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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Dr. Random: well team, have we finished research on the perfluorotributylamine samples yet?
gradstudent slave: yes and its a tremendously important chemical Dr. Random, have you read our summary?
Dr. Random: yes...it says here this is an incredibly powerful greenhouse gas...oh dear lord.....this means..
gradstudent slave: we need to alert the world in a peer reviewed open access journal without a moment to lose?!
Dr. Random: no...tell no one....this is the end of toques and tire chains as we know it!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Its frick'in -2F here in indiana. Lets hurry and produce that stuff more then to warm it up ok? Geez... Its freezing here!
Source of the magic smoke identified?
"Gotta make some more of this stuff! We'll bring forth the rapture even faster!"
That clorflourocarbons and their halon subsititues are inense greenhouse gases. here
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 to distract the masses from the greenhouse gases they expel in normal, everyday life. We'll be all focused on this gas and it gives us an excuse to ignore 7,000 other greenhouse effect contributors.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
"We claim that PFTBA has the highest radiative efficiency of any molecule detected in the atmosphere to date"
Get back to me when you replace the word "claim" with the word "prove."
Yup. your new car will no longer be aloud to smell "like a new car"
At 10^-34 parts per billion no body cares.
Donchathink?
Ummm, after searching google and filtering out results for "greenhouse", "climate", and "dictionary", the only uses I can find for this chemical are as a mass spectrometer calibration gas and as a component of fluon, which is an artificial blood replacement. Can anyone pin down any other uses of PFTBA? Because the usage of the stuff sure doesn't seem very heavy to me!
It'll be a damn sight cheaper than the coal you need to buy to up the temps enough for you there.
It's odd how people have been using this gas for 100 years and it is still "newly discovered."
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1283/
Global warming is not the issue.
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.)
It's odd how this gas has been used for 100 years and is still "newly discovered".
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1283/
I'm more worried about all the dihydrogen monoxide in the world.
Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2
... emitted whenever a politician speaks.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Where are the peer reviewed papers and corroborating research?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
That means it's potentially useful for terraforming Mars, or for preventing the next ice age when it comes around.
The synopsys cites transistors and capacitors as examples.
Those are two totally different electronic components that have very little in common with raw materials, composition, and construction.
I don't understand the connection.
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.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
If all of you /. nerds are have so much trouble with the math, image how the rest of use are doing.
The most shocking part of this environmental research was that it slipped through the Koch Whore-driven informational Iron Curtain of the Harper government.
and used by a few overclockers with full-immersion cooling systems.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
yes, everyone's CO2 output (breath) is about 40,000 ppm. Forty thousand.
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
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
PFTBA is a liquid even if it were in a container on the ground in Death Valley on the hottest day of the year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorotributylamine
Even wikipedia gets it wrong by claiming that what is a liquid at any normal temperature measurable on earth is a greenhouse "gas". Perhaps they meant to say the vapor is a greenhouse gas? Someone should edit that article to correct that mistake.
Maybe wikipedia meant volcanic PFTBA. What's that you say, volcanoes don't make PFTBA? Go figure.
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/supelco/442747u?lang=en®ion=US
At STP:
Boiling Point is 352F, Vapor Pressure is 1.3mm/Hg, and Density is 1.88g/mL.
The vapor pressure is so low and the boiling point, density and molecular weight are so high that any vapor is likely to condense and sink to the bottom of the sea.
"... no known processes that would destroy or remove PFTBA in the lower atmosphere ..." is not the same as "no processes". Solar radiation and ozonolysis are likely candidates and are known to break down other classes of halogenated hydrocarbons, such as CFCs. Processes below the atmosphere, i.e. in the sea, are apparently not considered and gravitational condensation is outside their thought processes too.
The nitrogen in PFTBA has an unshared pair of electrons, which means it's capable of forming quaternary ammonium salts which are water soluble. Once it's water soluble, any number of chemical reactions could break it down.
A more likely worrisome scenario than PFTBA causing Global Warming is that a large enough earthquake, or a volcano, on a continental shelf could destablize a large field of clathrates and release more methane into the atmosphere than all the man-made natural gas leaks combined, including Al Gore's flatulence.
Sulfur dioxide and trioxide are potent greenhouse gases and form acid rain too. Think "atmosphere of Venus". Tons of both are released into the atmosphere yearly, much more from volcanic activity than from man-made sources, yet no one seems to be too worried about that problem.
Some would rather cry like Chicken Little about the juice we put into our capacitors than the juice we put into our car batteries.
I'm a little bit worried about Global Cooling.
Perhaps some spray cans of PFTBA would prevent it? We could put Al Gore out to a legume pasture and let him graze and fart.
I am much more worried about the dumbing down of the human race with all of the Global Warming alarmists leading us all to a dismal idiocracy.
Good job trying to hoax us once again, Slashdot.
That is all.
Odd, this compound (liquid form) is found in every lab running mass spec EPA methods as the accepted calibrant.
Not even close. The Earth is accumulating heat at a rate of about 4 Hiroshima bombs per second. The increase in atmospheric temperatures has slowed a bit in the last decade+ but the oceans where over 90% of the heat goes continue to warm.
According to the original paper, "the global warming potential of PFTBA over a 100âyear time horizon to be 7100". That's still lower than SF6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas.
Everyone panic!!!
Mass spectroscopy as we know it will die!!! (Or we have to switch to PFK).
This is exactly the problem with people nowadays, if you read the entire article they're not comparing it on level to level "threat", it was a reference for people to understand it isn't as big a threat. Then people complain when the media takes thing out of context.
This stuff doesn't go away and those small samples could have (could) a major impact, think about how long it has been in use or about the planet, and that adds up over time. And the article also says the samples are from around the Toronto area, it would be interesting to see samples from other cities world wide.
Blah blah ...
Global warming we are all doomed
Blah blah
Only global government can save us
New taxes
1. It's a liquid up to fairly high temperature
2. It's vapor pressure is TINY so it hardly volatilizes at room temperature
3. It's expensive enough that it's primarily used in "closed loop" applications
4. It's part of a family called "Fluorinert". You might have see this in the movie Abyss.
I keep a box of matches handy for my 'methane' emissions.
...we get to endure 7,000 times the number of panicked articles about it?