Comments on: Tradeoffs and the next greenhouse gas

By: Grunchard

Grunchard — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:00:17 +0000

Why didn’t the authors give this argument ? Because they didn’t look at the issue.

Another flaw : If it generally admitted that HFCs account for 20% of the total impact of the refrigeration, which means the energy consumption accounts for the other 80 %.
Taking this ratio into account, as the total production of HFC in the AVERAGE scenario would be equivalent to 8 Million T CO2 éq, the required energy consumption would be 5 times higher i.e. 40 M tons CO2-éq, or as much as the TOTAL CO2 allowed by the stabilization scenario of 450 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. (And with containment measures, if it was 10% (improvement of the systems), one would need 80 M tons!)

By: MikeN

MikeN — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:41:24 +0000

Reserves can increase through time, as demand increases. Just because they are not known now, doesn’t mean they will not be found.

By: Grunchard

Grunchard — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:38:16 +0000

Although it is too early to comment in detail, a rapid calculation shows that the production of these high quantities of HFCs would exhaust the world fluorspar reserves even before the year 2050.

The authors forgot that trees don’t grow to the sky.

Extravagant predictions attract readers and make impressive headlines in the press, but why do they call that science ?

PS : this kind of exercice is not uncommon : at the time of the IPCC scenarios exercice, some scientist had forecasted a production of aluminum that would have consumed the whole electricty production of the planet.

By: MikeN

MikeN — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:11:26 +0000

So if you had a choice between CFCs or HFCs, which would you choose?