Perfluorotributylamine, Newly Discovered GHG '7,100 Times More Powerful Than CO2'
By Countercurrents.org
12 December 2013
Countercurrents.org
Scientists from the University of Toronto's department of chemistry have discovered a new greenhouse gas (GHG) called perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA), which is 7,100 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth and is produced by humans. The PFTBA does not occur naturally.
The PFTBA has been in use by the electrical industry since the mid-20th century. Its application is in electrical equipment, such as transistors and capacitors.
The newly identified chemical in the atmosphere appears to be a long-lived GHG that breaks all other chemical records for its potential to affect the climate.
A Toronto dateline report by Environment News Service (ENS) said [1]:
The PFTBA is the most radiatively-efficient chemical found to date.
Radiative efficiency describes how effectively a molecule can affect climate. This value is then multiplied by its atmospheric concentration to determine the total climate impact.
PFTBA is used in thermally and chemically stable liquids marketed for use in electronic testing and as heat transfer agents.
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. It is destroyed in the upper atmosphere.
The report cited Cora Young who was part of the University of Toronto Department of Chemistry team: “Global warming potential is a metric used to compare the cumulative effects of different greenhouse gases on climate over a specified time period.”
Angela Hong and their supervisor, Professor Scott Mabury are also in the team.
The ENS report said:
Different compounds stay in the atmosphere for different lengths of time, which determines how long-lasting the climate impacts are.
Carbon dioxide, CO2, is used as the baseline for comparison since it is the most important greenhouse gas responsible for human-induced climate change.
“PFTBA is extremely long-lived in the atmosphere and it has a very high radiative efficiency; the result of this is a very high global warming potential,” said Hong.
“Calculated over a 100-year time frame, a single molecule of PFTBA has the equivalent climate impact as 7,100 molecules of CO2,” she said.
The research report has been published online at Geophysical Research Letters on November 27, 2013.
Another report [2] Suzanne Goldenberg said:
The chemical breaks all records for potential impacts on the climate.
"We claim that PFTBA has the highest radiative efficiency of any molecule detected in the atmosphere to date," said 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 CO2. So PFTBA does not in any way displace the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal as the main drivers of climate change.
Dr Drew Shindell, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said:
"This is a warning to us that this gas could have a very very large impact on climate change – if there were a lot of it. Since there is not a lot of it now, we don't have to worry about it at present, but we have to make sure it doesn't grow and become a very large contributor to global warming."
He said a number of recent studies had drawn attention to other potential new GHGs which, like PFTBA, pack a lot of warming potential in each molecule but are not very prevalent in the atmosphere.
Such studies were a warning against increasing uses of such compounds without first understanding their impact on climate change, he added.
Report added:
From a climate change perspective, individually, PFTBA's atmospheric concentration does not significantly alert the phenomenon of climate change," Hong said. "Still the biggest culprit is CO2 from fossil fuel emissions."
But PFTBA is long-lived. The scientists estimated PFTBA remains in the atmosphere for about 500 years, and unlike CO2 that is taken up by forests and oceans, there are no known natural "sinks" on Earth to absorb it.
"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," she said.
"Individually each molecule is able to affect the climate potentially and because its lifetime is so long it also has a long-lasting effect."
Hong said the discovery of PFTBA and its warming potential raises questions about the climate impacts of other chemicals used in industrial processes.
The researchers said it was unclear how widespread its use was today.
It belongs to an entire class of chemicals used for industrial applications whose effects on the atmosphere remain unknown.
"PFTBA is just one example of an industrial chemical that is produced but there are no policies that control its production, use or emission," Hong said. "It is not being regulated by any type of climate policy.”
Source:
[1] December 9, 2013, “Super Greenhouse Gas Discovered 7,100 Times Stronger Than CO2”,
http://ens-newswire.com/2013/12/10/super-greenhouse-gas-discovered-7100-times-stronger-than-co2/
[2] US environment correspondent, theguardian.com, Dec 10, 2013
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