From the American Geophysical Union and the laughing gas department comes this story. I can’t wait for Greenpeace to start storming dental offices to “save the planet”. Of course Nitrous Oxide (N2O) has been out of favir for quite some time (it is also a GHG) so now they are after the modern gas anethietics desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane.
Anesthetic gases raise Earth’s temperature (a little) while you sleep
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The gases used to knock out surgery patients are accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere, where they make a small contribution to climate change, report scientists who have detected the compounds as far afield as Antarctica. Over the past decade, concentrations of the anesthetics desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane have been rising globally, the new study finds.
Like the well-known climate warmer carbon dioxide, anesthesia gases allow the atmosphere to store more energy from the Sun. But unlike carbon dioxide, the medical gases are extra potent in their greenhouse-gas effects.
One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of desflurane, for instance, is equivalent to 2,500 kilograms (5,512 pounds) of carbon dioxide in terms of the amount of greenhouse warming potential, explained Martin Vollmer, an atmospheric chemist at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology in Dubendorf, Switzerland, who led the new study. “On a kilogram-per-kilogram basis, it’s so much more potent” than carbon dioxide, he said.
In a new scientific paper, Vollmer and his colleagues report the 2014 atmospheric concentration of desflurane as 0.30 parts per trillion (ppt). Isoflurane, sevoflurane and halothane came in at 0.097 ppt, 0.13 ppt and 0.0092 ppt, respectively. Carbon dioxide – which hit 400 parts per million in 2014 -is a billion times more abundant than the most prevalent of these anesthetics. The team did not include the common anesthesia nitrous oxide in the study because it has many sources other than anesthetics. The team’s anesthesia-gas findings have been published online in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The researchers obtained their numbers by collecting samples of air from remote sites in the Northern Hemisphere since 2000, as well as aboard the icebreaker research vessel Araon during an expedition in the North Pacific in 2012 and at the South Korea Antarctic station King Sejong in the South Shetland Islands. They have also been tracking the anesthetics since 2013 in two-hourly measurements at a high-altitude observatory at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland, and from ongoing air sampling from a rooftop in a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland.
To turn these air samples into their global emissions estimates, the data were combined with a two-dimensional computer model of atmospheric transport and chemistry. The results are the first so-called top-down estimates–based on actual atmospheric measurements–of how many metrics tons of each anesthetic were released into the atmosphere in 2014. That can now be compared to “bottom-up” estimates by other researchers, which estimate atmospheric concentrations based on factors such as how much of each gas is sold annually, how much typically escapes through operating room vents and how much is not metabolized by patients.
Although anesthetics are small players in overall human-generated greenhouse emissions, they are a growing matter of concern to many in the health-care industry. Anesthesia gas abundances are growing and should not be overlooked, said Yale University School of Medicine anesthesiologist Jodi Sherman, a reviewer of the GRL paper.
“Health care in and of itself in the U.S. is one of the worst polluting industries,” she explained. “It generates 8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases according to one study. Add to this the fact that climate change has been recognized by the World Health Organization as the number one health issue of the 21st century, and it behooves us to do a better job with emissions.”
Anesthesia gases are something that the health care industry can easily do something about, Sherman added. Dropping desflurane, for instance, would make sense because it is the most potent greenhouse gas of the bunch. Not all anesthesiologists agree with that strategy, however.
“What the report fails to note is that a major factor determining the environmental effect is the manner in which the anesthetics are used,” said anesthesiologist Edmond Eger of the University of California at San Francisco. “Many anesthetists deliver sevoflurane or isoflurane in a two – three liters per minute flow but deliver desflurane in a lower flow – 0.5 to one liter per minute …. Some believe that desflurane has clinical advantages that argue for its continued use.”
“There’s nothing unique about desflurane that we can’t do with other drugs,” Sherman countered. “Desflurane we could live without, and every little bit makes a difference.”
###
The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing more than 60,000 members in 139 countries. Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and our other social media channels.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Nitrous Oxide is produced by nature and by internal combustion engines. It moves up to the upper atmosphere where UV breaks it down with an estimated life of 100-150 years. This is starting to sound an awful lot like carbon dioxide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide
N2O means molecular weight is 44; average weight of air is 35. then, how it can go to upper atmosphere? read my previous post on the idea of GHG and GHE.
Um, 44 is lighter than 35.
Sorry. I mixed it up when I reas.
Nitrogen, Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide all have different chemical weight but we have no problems with them mixing in the atmosphere. The combination of Brownian motion and the natural circulation of the air keeps things pretty mixed up.
NOx, oxides of nitrogen from automobiles have been greatly reduced over the years, mostly to reduce ground level air pollution. It takes combustion at high temperatures to combine the two elements.
Not really. Lean burn engines produce more because there is more oxygen available for the reaction. They use an additional catalyst to target the nitrogen compounds so they don’t show up in the exhaust.
Green house gas idea is ridiculous, greatest fraud in the history of science. The idea is imaginary, metaphorical, false science etc. GHE due to gases is impossible. They are actually helping the earth to cool or deliver heat back to space by convection method of heat transmission, a cooling system of Nature; it goes on all the time, day and night; man has no control over the system.
Bingo! +10!!
The “greenhouse theory” is pure bunk. Zero effect in the troposphere where that zero causes convection, an in the stratosphere and above it radiates to space, so cools.
Obviously the gas when coming in contact with “scientists ” induces insanity.
What about dihydrogen monoxide vapor ?
Chemically, I think hydrogen hydroxide would be more correct.
But dihydrogen monoxide sound scarier and more evil.
…as does sodium chloride and acetic acid sprinkled onto chips (‘fries’ to US citizens).
Oxygen dihydride anyone?
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide – Penn & Teller
http://www.sherv.net/cm/emo/laughing/crying-laughter-smiley-emoticon.gif
And it’s as easy as that, folks!
Bring back natural
childbirthdentistryBring back vivisection
Trepanning?
No wonder I’m sleepy
This is exactly how say, Madame Mao ruled China. Seeking perfection, tormenting everyone, killing millions.
Yes, this is where it is all going: all things we need to survive comfortably will be eliminated brutally no matter how horrible our lives become. The fanatics are like the Puritans or ISIS smashing stained glass windows or statues.
“…every little bit helps.”
What a naive simpleton statement.
Reminds me of, “…if it can save just one life…”
I used to run a mass spectrometer in the negative-chemical ionization mode. I had a small lecture bottle of sulfur hexafluoride to check for leaks in the system. SF6 is a potent GHG. We had to reports these small amounts of gas usage up the chain (I worked for the USGS at the time).
So an anesthesiologist was one of the reviewers of the paper. I guess that is ok, because it deals with anesthesia, but then she goes on to comment about global warming, how on earth is she qualified to do that?
“Extra potent” – Gotta love that.
Time to defund fear-mongering academia world-wide and let it become a hobby, it’s no good for anything else. This breed of academics have led us a merry dance, but enough is enough. If universities don’t wake up to themselves and get rid of the players and manipulators, they’ll go down with them when the mobs turn against green-breeding institutions. Funding destructive people to lie and cheat and misinform in the name of science, to destroy lives, economies, education, advancement, environments and eco-systems is a massive waste of investment and a massive foolishness.
People are waking up to it. Defund now.
(Yes, I know it won’t happen, try as they might, it’s all gone too far. Those in positions of power who jumped on the global jeopardy bandwagon now know they have a tiger by the tail and they don’t dare let go. It’s getting to the stage, though, when it will be no longer possible for anyone in the thick of it to pretend they are still ignorant of the truth.)
Three hundred parts per quadrillion, whoa, even at 2500x…scant radiative effect, but how about the anesthetic effect? Ok, ok, pretty slim there too. Need to find another reason why nobody can think anymore.
It’s that whole “residency” thing again. Because the CO2 that I breathe out whilst I’m writing this will be breathed in by a plant within the next 100 years, it apparently doesn’t have as much punch as the anaethetic gasses which will float around for 10,000 years. Never mind the fact that the CO2 produced by me (that is consumed later by a plant) will be replaced by CO2 my descendents will breathe out (keeping the ratio of gasses to each other constant), this is the kind of crazy mathematics warming bozos use. It’s even worse with water vapour. How else could anyone justify CO2 being credited with “between 9% and 27% of the total greenhouse effect”, when water vapour has 6 times the IR absorbtion bandwidth of CO2 and is 20 times more abundant in the atmosphere? I don’t know how you do maths, but that gives me a total of 120 times more effect for water vapour. But it’s all to do with that pesky “residency” again. If only we could identify the molecules that had been hanging around the longest and remove them, then we wouldn’t have to worry about the molecules we just released.
In case you don’t understand the “residency” idea, just think for a moment about the statement that any gas can be “2500 times more potent than CO2”. Really think about it. Imagine one of these gasses was at 400ppm in the atmosphere. Would Earth’s 3-8K of CO2 extra heat become 7500-20,000K of extra heat?
What about the IR band width. Does the fact that there are gasses that are 2500 times as potent as CO2 mean that CO2 maximum potential is to absorb less than 0.04% of the IR radiation leaving the surface?
Basic questions folks. Something the Luke warmist scientists who also post on here should be asking themselves.
It’s a matter of internal logic. The greenhouse theory contradicts itself at every step. The only thing that is verifiable is that different gasses absorb different bandwidths of the electromagnetic spectrum with different efficiencies in different conditions. Everything after that is just plain pseudo science
“Because the CO2 that I breathe out whilst I’m writing this will be breathed in by a plant within the next 100 years”
Or … within the next ten minutes. Really it depends where you and the plant are.
cui bono? A manufacturer with a patent for a new anesthetic.
It’s the light bulbs story all over again.
We’ve seen this before for sure, when Dupont invented a new refrigerant,
and again the atmosphere was seemingly in danger, but the new chemical
saved the day (for Dupont’s balance sheet & shareholders).
http://articles.philly.com/1993-09-16/business/25984545_1_cfcs-refrigerant-ozone-layer
Because there’s no explaining what your imagination
Can make you see and feel
Seems like a dream
They got me hypnotized
To all denialists and disbelievers:
You are to immediately surrender your offspring and all assets to UN IPCC.
Please report to GITMO FOR “REORIENTATION”
do I really need a sarc tag for this???
To late; the CO2 scare stories have already put most of us to sleep!
“Too”
“Add to this the fact that climate change has been recognized by the World Health Organization as the number one health issue of the 21st century…”
Pulease …
“Dena on April 8, 2015 at 8:33 pm
…Brownian motion and the natural circulation of the air keeps things pretty mixed up.”
I agree Dena. These guys are pretty mixed up but boy can they ever measure small things.
“Health care in and of itself in the U.S. is one of the worst polluting industries,” she explained. “It generates 8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases according to one study. Add to this the fact that climate change has been recognized by the World Health Organization as the number one health issue of the 21st century, and it behooves us to do a better job with emissions.”
So…. health care is causing climate change which causes health issues.
Thus, getting rid of health care must logically result in less climate change and healthier people.
I can’t even mock that.
By extension, we can’t let the 3rd world get health care…
(I lied, I can mock it after all)
And then they came for the Dentists and Surgeons!
“One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of desflurane, for instance, is equivalent to 2,500 kilograms (5,512 pounds) of carbon dioxide in terms of the amount of greenhouse warming potential”,
Is that because CO2 is nearing saturation at 400ppm while this stuff is still on the steep bit of the logarithmic curve? If not then why are they bothering about CO2 when they could be fixing this?
Doubters will of course suggest that the quantities and the effect are so trivial that this issue was hardly worthy of consideration in the first place.
But what about our children’s children’s children’s children’s (etc)…children.
Are you people cruelly suggesting that we should leave them to solve the problems of the world in which they find themselves? A world potentially containing miniscule quantities of nitrous oxide.
(And don’t forget, when visualizing said children, to entertain a mental image of them as a hoard of helpless 7 year olds picking their way through mountains of consumer detritus.)
Act now on N2O. No 2 N2O. To N2O or not to N2O? That is the question, etc!!!!
Atmospheric scientists have found that the atmosphere is much better at self-cleaning than they had previously thought. Furthermore, most of the alarmists ignore that these gases have a half-life in the atmosphere. CO2 and methane have half-lives of about 5–6 years, which belies the bogus fabricated half-lives of 200, 500, and 1000 years posted by The Team, IPCC, and NASA. These large half-lives are propaganda used to suggest that ALL of the emissions from the Industrial Revolution are still in the air. If this was true, then the 1970 Clean Air Act wold have been useless. Instead, the air in the US is orders of magnitude better than it was in 1970. And the CO2 monitoring site on Mauna Loa, Hawaii would not see the large seasonal up and down swings in CO2 concentrations.
So, since the early 1800’s when N2O was first used as an anaesthetic we have been pumping this “greenhouse gas” into the atmosphere and has the world got warmer? No! To compound the misery of soul-less electric cars, sitting in on winter nights in the dark because the wind isn’t blowing at the right speed and solar panels don’t work, we now have to have surgery with pain relief of a bottle of whisky and a belt to bite on! What a delightful, unnecessary prospect!
Oxygen will soon be named a climate change pollutant.
If a gas can absorb radiation, it can also emit it. These gases are saturated during the day in sunlight and would be actively absorbing and emitting IR radiation, effectively making the results a wash, or no effect. A small fraction (0.012 for CO2, a number dishonestly altered by the IPCC to 0.12) of the absorbed energy would go to heat energy in the air, but heat in the air can just as easily be converted to IR, again making it a wash. It is at night, when there is no solar input that these gases would be actively converting heat energy in the air into IR radiation, which is then lost to space, which has no temperature, being a vacuum.
It is only junk science, based on an Arrhenius failed hypothesis, that supports the idea that a trace gas can warm the atmosphere. But, global warming by CO2 “scientists” does not say that these gases directly warm the air. They say that they reflect or emit IR radiation from the upper tropical troposphere back to Earth’s surface, which then warms the climate by conduction. As ALL of the gases in the tropical upper troposphere are at -17 deg C and the Earth’s surface is at 15 deg C, any IR radiation sent downward would be reflected by the surface as energy levels corresponding to the radiation from the troposphere would already by full. The net result is that the downward IR would be reflected and then lost to space, i.e., no effect.
As the warmist “science” requires that the upper tropical troposphere be warming faster than the surface and this “hotspot” has never been detected after decades of observations, the warmist “scientists” have simply ceased to talk about it, having failed. In fact, this region of the atmosphere has been found to be cooling slightly over the last 30 years. The warmists are now pretending that they have been saying that greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere directly by conversion of IR radiation to heat in the air. Typically, they cannot admit that their “science” has failed, ignore the failure and simply turn to another aspect of their junk science.