Global warming caused by chlorofluorocarbons, not carbon dioxide, new study says

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-global-chlorofluorocarbons-carbon-dioxide.html

by DanielBMarkham • 13 years ago

65 108 13 years ago

pvnick11• 13 years ago

What's up with "global warming" these days? I was under the impression that, since there hasn't been any recent evidence of warming, everybody had just substituted the more general term "climate change" to deal with anthropogenic environmental stuff.

I'm really crossing my fingers that preventing anthropogenic global warming is as simple as banning CFCs. A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered could seriously stress the economy.

duncan_bayne4• 13 years ago

That must be what optimism looks like.

You need to understand that many - a minority perhaps, but many - of the supporters of emission controls are opposed to industry per se, not the effects of same.

guelo4• 13 years ago

And many - who knows what percentage - of deniers are motivated by hatred of liberals or environmentlists or Democrats or the UN or scientists. So what?

andyl2• 13 years ago

Yeah, what about the so-called 'global warming'?? We need to protect that oil and gas industry at all costs.

BTW, I heard that evolution is just a 'theory', and many experts seriously doubt that it can be true.

pvnick11• 13 years ago

We know much less about the climate than we do about evolution.

guelo4• 13 years ago

That Fox News myth has been debunked http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/23/1909881/debunkin...

But like a lot of propaganda it continues being spread after being killed. Zombie propaganda.

pvnick11• 13 years ago

I'm not quite sure what point the article was trying to make. It simply read like an unnecessarily rude and polarizing circle jerk. One one had, the author vaguely hints towards some sort of conspiracy only to offer one of his own (Frank Luntz and his back-room terminology redefining). Pure crap.

breadbox• 13 years ago

"I'm really crossing my fingers that preventing anthropogenic global warming is as simple as banning CFCs."

The snarky response of What's the weather like on your planet? has never seemed more appropriate.

HEYGRANDMA• 13 years ago

It's been called climate change for quite some time; for instance the IPCC was established in 1988: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipcc

AnthonyMouse6• 13 years ago

>A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered could seriously stress the economy.

A lot of the CO2 emission control schemes being considered are lame.

The key to reducing CO2 is to commit to a policy that will affect the energy market in a gradual, predictable way: A slow phase in of a carbon tax. Raise the carbon tax the equivalent of $0.25/gallon every year, forever. No increase in the year the tax passes.

That means no economic effect this year. No change at all -- except that everyone now expects gas to be $5/gallon in four years, so if you're buying a car now you better get something with an electric motor on it. If you're investing in energy you better invest in renewables rather than petroleum. And then by the time the gas tax is $1 higher than it is now, the installed base of cars has been replaced with higher efficiency ones, so the burden of the tax is already mitigated because a) you're now buying less gas, and b) so is everyone else, so demand goes down, so the pre-tax price of gas goes down and cancels out a significant portion of the tax.

Meanwhile the government collects a large pile of cash (largely at the expense of oil company profits -- what a shame) that can be used to subsidize the installation of renewable energy generating capacity, which creates jobs etc. etc.

msandford7• 13 years ago

Given our government's not very excellent management of Social Security I wouldn't bet on them wisely spending on renewables when there are all kinds of other things the money could be spent on. As such I'm a bit skeptical of your proposal.

EDIT: sarcasm removed

baddox7• 13 years ago

You forget that the line between "government" and "oil companies" in many countries is a fuzzy one. Most people will either blame this on the oil companies (stereotypical liberal viewpoint) or the government (stereotypical conservative viewpoint), but I prefer to just point out that there's not a big difference between the two.

ams61103• 13 years ago

Your electric car simply transfers the carbon emissions from the tailpipe to the local powerplant smokestacks (unless your utility uses nukes).

pvnick11• 13 years ago

Your central argument rests on anthropogenic, CO2-caused global warming being irrefutably true. This statement is not yet known to be certain, and the reality is that the economic effect of such an infinitely-increasing tax must be weighed against the risk of that statement being wrong.

Your proposition is example of exactly the extremist control scheme I was talking about.

Lagged2Death• 13 years ago

I was under the impression that, since there hasn't been any recent evidence of warming, everybody had just substituted the more general term "climate change"...

Addresses a couple of your impressions rather directly:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/04/23/1909881/debunkin...

saurik• 13 years ago

I am not qualified to judge either side (nor did I even find this link: someone on r/science commented with it), but this article may be interesting to those who are (and I certainly would be interested in hearing the opinions of others):

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Could-CFCs-be-causing-global...

gus_massa• 13 years ago

Nice graph! It was very strange that the graph in the original article only covers the last 50 years. (I understand that a graph is not a proof, but it's an easy way to look at the information.)

I searched for a similar graph of Temp-CO2. The first entry in Google images is: http://zfacts.com/p/226.html It covers a similar period of time and has a similar scale.

The first thing I noted is that there is a temperature bump circa 1940 and neither the CO2 or CFC concentrations have a bump at that time. Is there any explanation for it?

woodchuck64• 13 years ago

Qing-Bin Lu doesn't have a good record in climate science as discussed here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/lu-fro..., so I'm not holding my breath over this one.

pvnick11• 13 years ago

It may help if you refuted the central argument rather than attacking the source.

3am3• 13 years ago

They're both wrong. Global warming is caused smartphone batteries.

And don't give me the old, "That's obviously stupid" response. I demand a good faith refutation that treats my central thesis seriously, even though my predictions have a poor track record and my thesis is outside of mainstream consensus.

btilly6• 13 years ago

Given that he's making the same argument that was refuted previously, the link is very applicable.

In any case estimating the relative impact of different chemicals in the air right now is a relatively straightforward modeling problem. And from that we know that our introduction of CFCs contributes a lot less radiative forcing to the atmosphere than our CO2 and methane increases. (What is much harder is estimating future growth in gasses, and the variety of feedback loops. But current impact of changes is something we know pretty reliably, and CFCs are not the top cause.)

guelo4• 13 years ago

It actually seems like the Lu paper being debunked in that RealClimate link is the same paper that for some reason has been republished in another journal now.

http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S021797921350...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370157309...

waterlesscloud2• 13 years ago

Those appear to be different, though related, papers.

It looks like the new paper contains attempts to address the previous criticisms.

The new paper is on arxiv, for the curious

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.6844.pdf

stephengillie• 13 years ago

This "new" study was released in 2009.

http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/qing-bin-lu-is-trying...

guelo4• 13 years ago

That is really suspicious. It seems the paper was published by Elsevier's Physics Reports in 2009 and now republished by South Korea's International Journal of Modern Physics B.

leohutson• 13 years ago

Is the "International Journal of Modern Physics" as published by "World Scientific" considered a reputable journal?

greenyoda• 13 years ago

It's indexed by a number of scientific abstracts services[1], but not being a physicist, I can't tell you how significant that is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Journal_of_Moder...

vxNsr• 13 years ago

This is probably one of the most controversial and highly politicized topics of the last and current decade. Lets see if we can discuss this without bringing politics into the discussion.

DennisP4• 13 years ago

The physics of CO2 trapping heat is well-established, and pretty well matches the amount of warming we've seen. So if it's actually CFCs causing warming, then two things have to be true:

1) There's some kind of unknown physical process that prevents warming by CO2, and

2) The warming from CFCs happens to match the expected warming from CO2.

Seems shaky.

baddox7• 13 years ago

Except that the article claims that global temperatures have decreased since 2002, correlating with a decrease in CFCs but with no correlation to CO2.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

or that CFCs and CO2 are both responsible?

Why does everything need to be black and white?

msandford7• 13 years ago

Because these days, everything is political even if it shouldn't be. And people need to feel good about themselves for picking the "correct" party, whichever party that is. Think for yourself? Why bother! Jump on our bandwagon instead.

DennisP4• 13 years ago

Indeed they are both responsible. Right now I'm looking at page 6 of Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, which has a table of climate forcings. CO2 is the biggest, but CFCs are in there too, along with methane, N2O, ozone, and black carbon aerosols.

It's just the "not carbon dioxide" part that seems dubious to me.

johnny99• 13 years ago

That link claims that global temperatures have declined since 2002, which is untrue. Will hunt for more authoritative sources, but a quick search turns up this story from Forbes, refuting that non-fact: http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/02/05/global-wa...

msandford7• 13 years ago

Yeah the problem there is that isn't not conclusively proven either way.

The crux of the argument is that the error bands on the last 10-15 years of temperature data show that the trend isn't cooling, and that in fact it's just a slow decade and about to be followed by a warm one. And we all know that can happen.

Problem is, the error bands are significant relative to any cherry picked "things are warming up" 8-15 years OR any "things are cooling down" 8-15 years and as such, no rigorous conclusion can be drawn.

We'll know more in a decade. Sadly that's how it works when you're measuring stochastic processes.

khawkins• 13 years ago

I believe the general consensus is that there is no statistical increase in temperature over the past decade. However, that source isn't exactly reliable considering the existence of global warming is, in a large part, key to his business model.

paul_f• 13 years ago

As we move from coal based to natural gas based electricity generation around the world, the amount of CO2 emissions as a percentage of energy produced will naturally decrease. There are fewer carbon atoms attached to natural gas than coal, and as a result, less are launched into the atmosphere as a by product of burning it for power. Even if we do nothing other than let the natural gas revolution take root, the amount of CO2 in the air, and hence the amount of global warming will be reduced significantly.

tl;dr if CO2 does cause global warming, it will be fixed on its own

markkat• 13 years ago

However, the half-life of atmospheric CO2 is about 100 years.

ams61103• 13 years ago

But the energy density of natural gas is a lot less than coal, so you are burning more gas to get the same energy output. I'm not sure it is quite a wash, gas is cleaner in a lot of other ways (no particulates, no or very little sulfur, etc.)

ars4• 13 years ago

> But the energy density of natural gas is a lot less than coal, so you are burning more gas to get the same energy output.

No you aren't, and no it isn't. Not if you measure by weight. By weight natural gas is 2 or 3 times more dense.

jerf2• 13 years ago

This would be really, really good news if it were true. We have demonstrated the ability to put these things into the atmosphere, with 40-50 year-old tech, and as an accidental side effect rather than a deliberate attempt to do so. We have demonstrated the ability to let them decay out of the atmosphere without adding significantly more. If the CFCs had this level of impact on the atmospheric temperature, this would give us such an enormous stick in global temperature management that at the very least the fears of a new ice age [1] could be put to rest for the duration of our technological civilization, and of course there's the fact that it would also demonstrate that our CO2 contribution is also not that big a deal so our warming fears could also be all but put to bed.

It's such good news, in fact, that I daresay it's too good a bit of news. The Cynic's Razor [2] may not be quite as reliable as Occam's Razor, but it's still pretty darned reliable. (Unfortunately.) Alas, the Cynic's Razor must slash this theory away without a great deal more evidence.

[1] I fear global cooling far more than I fear global warming. I say that without regard to any immediate probability estimates of the two, I'm considering the whole life span of civilization here. Take the worst global warming scenario you've ever heard. The compare it to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iceage_north-intergl_glac_... And bear in mind that "areas with no growing season to speak of" continues a significant distance beyond the glaciers themselves. Canada and Britain completely uninhabitable. The US, Russia, and most if not all of Europe with zero growing season for any commercially-viable crop. Similar problems in the southern hemisphere. Global warming may be bad for civilization, an Ice Age is potentially death to the entire concept of civilization. YMMV.

[2] Drat! Not quite an original construct: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Cynic%27s+Razor%22 So close.

DennisP4• 13 years ago

Eh...the worst global warming scenario I've ever heard? Positive feedbacks like methane emissions take hold, and even if we stop emissions entirely the planet tips itself into its hot mode, when sea levels were about a hundred meters higher and most life on the planet was clustered around the poles.

No wait, the worst is a repeat of the greatest mass extinction ever, killing off 95% of the species on Earth, caused in part by ocean acidification leading to mass emissions of hydrogen sulfide.

jerf2• 13 years ago

Well, fair enough based on my wording I suppose. But on the one hand you have events that happened a very long time ago, whereas on the other you have the fact that we're in an "intraglacial period" in a "current ice age" right now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene (first paragraph, I suggest also clicking on the "current ice age" link).

I'm actually more worried that warming could still somehow lead us back into the ice age (chaos is nasty stuff) than the catastrophic warming scenarios. Both are theoretically possible, but we are so much closer to an ice age than heat disaster right now. However much we may or may not moved the climate it certainly hasn't been very far away from "ice age" in the grand scheme of things.

commanda3• 13 years ago

This article doesn't address the CFC effect relative to the effect of CO2 emissions fallout landing on the glaciers and polar ice caps, which changes the albedo of the ice, resulting in melting them. More and more ice melts every year, and less re-freezes, raising the sea level, altering the salinity, changing the worldwide currents, resulting in massive change to the ocean biomes. Does that result in less climate change than CFCs eroding the ozone layer over the poles?

ars4• 13 years ago

> of CO2 emissions fallout

The what? Did you typo? If you didn't, then the article did not address it because there is no such thing.

commanda3• 13 years ago

Ok, sorry, I meant carbon particulate (soot), not CO2.

Global warming caused by chlorofluorocarbons, not carbon dioxide, new study says

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