Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to The Conversation, people who use asthma inhalers release damaging amounts of greenhouse gasses.
Your asthma puffer is probably contributing to climate change, but there’s a better alternative
March 26, 2018 6.01am AEDT
Brett Montgomery.
Senior Lecturer in General Practice, University of Western Australia
I breathe all the way out. There’s a quiet puff of gas from my inhaler, and I breathe all the way in. I hold my breath for a few seconds and the medicine is where it needs to be: in my lungs.
Many readers with asthma or other lung disease will recognise this ritual. But I suspect few will connect it with climate change. Until recently, neither did I.
…
These medicines are available in various sorts of inhaler devices. The devices fall into two broad types: “metered dose inhalers” and “dry powder inhalers” of various shapes and sizes.
In metered dose inhalers, the medicine and a pressurised propellant liquid are mixed together in a little canister, and then sprayed out of the inhaler in a measured puff of fine mist. This is inhaled, often after passing through a “spacer” which allows more of the medicine to reach the lungs. While the medicine is absorbed by the body, the propellant, now a gas, is exhaled unchanged.
…
The one most often found in asthma metered dose inhalers, norflurane, is 1,430 times more potent than the best-known warming culprit, carbon dioxide. Another, apaflurane, is 3,220 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Such warming power explains why even the small amounts in an inhaler are significant. Globally, tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent are attributable annually to these inhaler gases.
…
A person using a preventer inhaler monthly, plus the odd reliever inhaler, could easily release the annual equivalent of a quarter of a ton of carbon dioxide — that’s like burning 100 litres of petrol.
…
If metered dose inhalers are a better choice for you, please don’t panic or quit your medicines. These gases probably won’t be the biggest contributor to your personal carbon footprint. Asthma control is really important, and these medicines work really well. But consider changing if it’s an option for you — when it comes to reducing our footprint, every little bit counts.
As a lifelong asthmatic I’m familiar with different inhalers. I can tolerate the powder inhalers, but I know people who can’t – powder inhalers can irritate the airways. It would be unfortunate and harmful if this stretch of a climate warning develops into a movement to ban HFC propellent in asthma inhalers, or makes such inhalers more difficult to obtain or more expensive.
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Why do Alarmists hate people so much? An Asthma attack is a deadly event. Those inhalers are live saving devices. And guess what? The medicine is ingested; it isn’t going into the atmosphere.
The old inhalers (the inhalers outlawed by international law) allegedly destroyed the Ozone Layer. Interesting that Big Pharma lobbied to remove them. One could buy those inhalers for $25 plus the medicine. They were effective and life saving. We’re going backwards.
Where are the former EPA execs and political agents now? They used asthma as a health science basis for reshaping the American economy in their own image without regard to cost.
These carbonastrophists deserve an award; for biggest a-holes of the planet.
Yep, what we used to sell for $10 is now $60 or up up up with the newer ones.
I am a veterinarian and due to the cost increase and the change to no propellant inhalers I have patients that will either die or be euthanized due to this.
Honest, I was using wild satire in the above ‘euthanasia’ comment! I had no idea that the cited scheme could impact innocent animals.
While I enjoy good health, I’m very aware that others to do not unless they have some small portable aid with them. So now I”m thinking about those people I see dragging oxygen carts with them. They MUST be contributing to global warming by taking O2 out of the air and putting it in a tank for personal use! What an abomination! /sarc
What’s next? Don’t put sugar on your cereal, because sugar is a carbohydrate and eating carbohydrates will give you a massive attack of flatulence????
Do these people have nothing better to do than use their pea-sized brains to find fault with everything?
Sorry, mods, just getting wigged over the sheer stupidity of this article’s author’s remarks. Keep posting this stuff. It gives me an excuse to go make a batch of cookies with my gas-fired oven. 🙂
On the same theme it seems to me that the only rational thing to do is to cut down those notorious harbourers of CO2, trees, and blast them off into space. We need to rid ourselves of all the carbon we can in any way before it gets us!
I think the trees are watching me! There’s one outside my window and its been there for ages! All that carbon! Just sitting there watching me!
Wait. This idiot wants people to give up their proven, WORKING technology because they *might* possibly be contributing the equivalent of two tanks of gasoline (at least for a car like mine) PER YEAR?
If I were asthmatic I’d tell this windbag to get bent.
All I know about asthma is when my wife came home from the docs with our first son under one to announce he was asthmatic and would need medication. He’d been coughing ,wheezing and sneezing with runny noses for some time which I’d put down to going off the breast and into childcare as mum went back relief teaching. She was adamant the doc was right but I called BS for the aforesaid reasoning. He’s a strapping 35 year old electrician that’s just retired from football but loves his surfing and never had anymore asthma in his life. That’s all I know about asthma.
If AGW clown show ever found out how much perfluorocarbon tracers I’ve released over the last 20 years, they would have a hitman looking for me.
“The old inhalers (the inhalers outlawed by international law) allegedly destroyed the Ozone Layer. Interesting that Big Pharma lobbied to remove them. One could buy those inhalers for $25 plus the medicine. They were effective and life saving. We’re going backwards.”
Wasn’t it some Senator’s daughter …
Which got me thinking as a baby boomer schooled in the 50s and 60s (and some into early 70s) I never heard of anyone being asthmatic or allergic to anything but my how times have changed. Presumably that’s all down to our new friend CO2 as well nowadays?
What happened to asthmatics in those days pre inhalers presumably. Did they all perish and didn’t make it to school?
Presumably the whooping cough or polio got to them first.
Apparently, kids who grow up with dogs are much less likely to develop asthma. Something to do with immune system priming I think. LIkewise they now suggest that kids be exposed to peanuts at an early age to reduce the likelihood of allergies later on.
observa. A lot of pre- albuterol inhalers patients used very rough and dangerous medicines. Amenophlen, epinephrine injections and inhalation. Many suffered all their lives before modern inhalers came along. And yes, some young people outgrow asthma but millions more don’t. It is a dangerous and progressive disease.
100 litres! WOW! That is the equivalent of less than 4 minutes flight time for a G4 private jet. So 1 climate warrior’s round trip to Paris in a G4 has the GHG footprint of about 300 asthmatics for an entire year. Better euthanize the asthmatics. It would be terrible to keep Al and Leo at home when they need to be out saving the world.
The inhaler shown is no longer used by the VA, and any civilian hospital I have been in.
…and hasn’t been used for several years.
Mine was used just this morning! It not only feels good to breathe freely, I can take heart that I am contributing, in some infinitesimally small way, to the beneficial warming of the planet.
This guy lies. I remember bad asthma since at least 1946. I take powder inhalers 2 puffs twice a day, also singular and still need Ventolin many days and intact just used some. They say the powder inhalers can work as rescue med. But when I do that the fungal infection in my mouth, which I have constantly, flares up and I can’t eat.
Use whatever works best for you, buddy. The world will get along just fine.
If you have not heard it before, you can reduce the problems with fungal infection by leaning your head back when inhaling your medicine. Less will stuck in the throat then. A mouth wash, including gurgeling, with plain water directly afterwards reduces too.
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! HERP A DERP A DERP A HERP A HER A DPER AERPDPASKSODGJPOFPAOSRHPOAIHGOIAHGDOAIHGO….. can’t stand these idiots.
Of course Americans died when they banned primatene mist. Anytime you remove the most effective life-saving drug from the market it will cost many lives. You don’t need your doctor’s dogmatic opinion to have your own science-based rational one. I’ve had severe asthma since early childhood and you can rest assured Primatene Mist saved my life many times. In fact I would be rushed to the hospital as a child to get injectable medication that helped a lot. I had both primatene mist and albuterol at home, as an adult but the albuterol is far less effective. Within a week of running out of primatene mist, due to the ban, I was collapsing on my neighbor’s porch after crawling 250 through snow. It was so bad I could not speak so I did not try the phone. After being prescribed $500 worth of medication and a $200 doctor visit things got worse. He made the claim that primatene mist was harming people and I pointed out to him that I had done the medical research and he was a liar. If you do the research you’ll come to the same conclusion I have. It wasn’t about medicine it was about politics and doctors that are willing to harm their patients for politics and they should not be practicing medicine in any country. I watch my friends give their children Albuterol and their asthma attack continues or maybe improves 5 or 10%. Then when doctors realized they weren’t working they prescribed 50 million tubes they call spacers which coats the spacer walls with medication instead of your lungs. Brilliant. But when they realized the spacers would not improve a minimally effective inhaler those went by the wayside real quick-didn’t they. If It is more important to doctors to have an incestuous relationship with politicians and pharmaceutical reps, than their patients, then so be it. Just quit being a coward and admit it. Anytime a doctor or group of doctors are willing to debate this subject I have a location and a microphone and I’m willing to pay for it. But just so we’re clear I am a polemicist and I will verbally brutalize you with medical facts and torment your “God complex” with moral and ethics. I may not write well but I have an absolutely devastating dagger tipped tongue. 100 of my friends laughing hysterically while Doctors Flee to their car in humiliation would be absolutely fantastic payback for what they’ve done to innocent people-innocent children.
This B.S. comes from the IPCC’s assessment reports:
IPCC AR5 Chapter 8
Scroll down to page 710 Paragraph 8.7.1.2 The Global Warming Potential Concept (GWP).
It’s in there with my favorite whipping boy, methane, which is eleventy-seven times more potent than carbon dioxide. Authors, like Brett Montgomery who wrote this crap, never tell us how much the release of whatever chemical that they are concerned about, business as usual, will run-up global temperatures. Reason number one that they don’t tell us is that they don’t know. Even if they read the section in the IPCC report where that number comes from they still wouldn’t know. They would have to run through the math in IPCC’s (GWP) section to find out, because the IPCC has chosen not to report the actual temperature rise that, business as usual, the various compounds listed would produce.
The failure of the IPCC to highlight those Business as Usual (GWP) temperature results should be in any list of the top reasons why the IPCC reports should be regarded as essentially propaganda.
Methane is a great one. They utterly ignore the fact that methane can be seen bubbling up constantly in virtually any lake in the world. Meanwhile, the production of commercial natural gas is very efficient with minimal leakage and results in burning which transforms it to CO2 and water.
A complete non-problem within the larger non-problem of non-existent global warming.
John harmsworth March 26, 2018 at 9:13 am
Methane is a great one. …
Thanks for the reply – apparently I lied the IPCC in a roundabout way does tell you how much methane will run up temperatures. Here’s where:
Chapter 8 IPCC AR5
scroll down to page 720 to find figure 8.33:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/figures/WGI_AR5_Fig8-34.jpg
You will notice that the temperatures are in (mK). I read that as 0.001K. So from their chart I come up with the following values for methane:
That rounds off nicely to 0.02 K So it looks like 86 times more powerful than CO2 isn’t so scary after all.
*That’s supposed to be ten to the minus three Kelvin
Re: methane – It is a derivative of animal digestion of foods of all kinds, and is a very useful gas because it contains nitrogen, which plants like, among other molecules. The problem with these pompous pontificators is that they forget that every time they eat something, they produce mass quantities of methane, which is also a flammable gas.
If only there were some way to…. well, you get the drift. 🙂
I thought methane was CH4?
Sara, methane does not contain nitrogen, MarkW is right.
How ironic. This WUWT page opened up with a header advertisement for a homeopathic respirator. That is entirely consistent with the “best known warming culprit” being the homeopathic control constituent for weather, and by averaging over a number of years, climate.
From the link is this bogus claim:
“The one most often found in asthma metered dose inhalers, norflurane, is 1,430 times more potent than the best-known warming culprit, carbon dioxide. Another, apaflurane, is 3,220 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Such warming power explains why even the small amounts in an inhaler are significant. Globally, tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent are attributable annually to these inhaler gases.”
Suuure, if you can SPECTRALLY show the impact, but you didn’t try just the usual unverified potency claims.
Of course, so called “warming potentials” or “radiative forcing” are in no way connected with the spectral properties of molecules. IPCC gives computational formulas for different gases including empirical coefficients. There is no reason to think it scientific truth.
Yawn. Such Hydrofluorocarbons are designed so that they degraded by UV/O2/Ozone in the atmosphere.
It’s just a sign that they have nothing to say or write about at “The Conversation.” (Their title itself is a giveaway. A bit like any country that has “democratic” in its title, you know that it is almost certainly the opposite.)
The (One-Sided) Conversation
inhalers used to be about $20. now after environmental concerns they are $200.
but it is all good. the $20 inhalers worked. the $200 inhalers not so well.
“A person using a preventer inhaler monthly, plus the odd reliever inhaler, could easily release the annual equivalent of a quarter of a ton of carbon dioxide…”
A person that never uses an inhaler could easily release the annual equivalent of a half of a ton of carbon dioxide. But don’t anybody tell them… it’s worse than they thought!
Well, yes, Nick, but when you eat beans or cabbage, it’s also true that people frequently release other gases into the atmosphere. Not sure what my personal signature of methane is, but I can make a pot of 16-bean soup last for at least a week.
Inside the body or outside?
There is nothing that shameless musanthropic climate extremists won’t misrepesent to advance their hateful ideology.
How long do the inhaler gasses linger in the open air?…
to ask just one logical question.
100 lters of gas is less than 2 tanks of a typical car per year.
Even if one grants the clinate is sensitive, 2 tsks is trivial compared to saving the kives of asthma sufferers.
This lstest from the (non)conversation judt shows how perverse climate extremism is.
Remember, we must not allow anything that improves the human condition in any way.