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.'"

Comments

Concentrations

[i kan reed]

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

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. The current levels are .18 parts per TRILLION, as compared to 400 parts per MILLION for CO2. Convert the CO2 concentration to the same units and you're comparing 0.18 for the new one to 400,000,000 for carbon dioxide. So, even if it does have an effect of 7000 times, that still only makes it comparable to 1260 vs. 400,000,000.

Re:Concentrations

[jonnythan]

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.

Re:Concentrations

[strech]

Did you just randomly combine numbers? Your math has nothing to do with anything.

.18 parts per trillion = 0.00000018 parts per million for PFTBA, vs 400 parts per million for CO2.

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.
 

Re:Concentrations

[Antipater]

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.

Orders of magnitude

[thebes]

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.

Re:Meanwhile in russia

[i kan reed]

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.

Bucky quote

[schneidafunk]

"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

Concentrations of PFTBA in the atmosphere are low

[ArcadeMan]

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.

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

[Trepidity]

"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."

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.

Re:Until tomorrow?

[Antipater]

Given that sulfur hexafluoride has almost triple the potency of this, and has a concentration around 7 ppt, I think that record's already been set.

Billions are larger than millions

[Geoffrey.landis]

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

[Bengie]

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 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

[Culture20]

But the initial comparison was between millions and billions. While methane may be 20x more effective, it's not 1000x more effective.

Re:Billions are larger than millions

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.)

Re:Billions are larger than millions

[Antipater]

Water is already regulated by the atmosphere itself. It has a nifty little trick called "rain" that prevents vapor levels from getting too high.

Re:Billions are larger than millions

[something_wicked_thi]

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:That is what we need to terraform Mars!

[Geoffrey.landis]

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

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/content/dam/sigma-aldrich/structure1/050/mfcd00000436.eps/_jcr_content/renditions/large.png

Re:Meanwhile in russia

[daem0n1x]

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

[csumpi]

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.)

Re:global warming is not the issue

[jeffmflanagan]

That's not remotely simple. How do you propose to stop people from breeding?

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.

Literally, my first thought reading the headline

[Alsee]

Newly Discovered Greenhouse Gas Is 7,000 Times More Powerful Than CO2

... emitted whenever a politician speaks.

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