3 ms·
Yeah, I was just curious if we had traded one environmental catastrophe for another - like if HCFCs were better for ozone but far more potent greenhouse gas pol
by nocoiner 3y ago
Yeah, I was just curious if we had traded one environmental catastrophe for another - like if HCFCs were better for ozone but far more potent greenhouse gas pollutants. I think I’ve read something along similar lines about another substance - perhaps how natural gas is actually a fairly clean burning fuel, but leakages of raw natural gas are terrible in terms of GHG potency.
- Full_Clark 3y agoThey're definitely potent but I don't know how the total emitted mass compares to CO2, or how their atmospheric lifespans affect the impact. I would bet the information is out there and has already been analyzed in IPCC reports or peer-reviewed studies. But the writing can be quite dense and I don't have time at the moment to do more than skim the documents that turn up in search. Given how they're constantly referred to as transition chemicals in reference to the banning of CFCs, I would expect that the warming potential of HCFCs is regarded as dangerous but necessary, and therefore a bad outcome but less bad than continued degradation of the ozone layer. FWIW, this document indicates that failing to abate the emission of methane, black carbon aerosols, ozone, and HFCs (note, a bigger class of gases than merely HCFCs) will result in an extra 0.5 degree C of warming by 2100. But I'm not sure what proportion of that belongs to each substance individually. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15112799/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15112799/