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

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.

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.

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.)