Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, researcher claims in controversial study
"In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming."
The peer-reviewed paper published this week not only provides new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change but has superior predictive capabilities, compared with the conventional sunlight-driven ozone-depleting and CO2-warming models, Lu argues.
Did you bother googling around about this hypothesis? Doesn't look like it!
Look - what I read from the real experts in this is that CFC's ARE 10,000 TIMES more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat. PFC's are even higher - at 15k to 17k more powerful - and are being considered to help terraform Mars in the distant future as part of cooking up that freezing planet.
But this is all irrelevant. There just are not enough CFC's to cook the earth and account for how much warming there has been.
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Lu's hypothesis can be disproven very simply. He argues that the radiative forcing (global energy imbalance) from CFCs matches global surface temperatures better than that from CO2 over the past decade. This is because as a result of the
Montreal Protocol, CFC emissions (and emissions of other halocarbons) have been flat over the past decade, and global surface air temperatures have also been essentially flat during that short timeframe, while CO2 emissions have continued to rise.
However, a global energy imbalance doesn't just impact surface temperatures. In fact, only about 2% of global warming is used in heating the atmosphere, while about
90% heats the oceans. Over the past decade, ocean and overall global heating have continued to rise rapidly, accumulating the equivalent of about 4 Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations per second (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Land, atmosphere, and ice heating (red), 0-700 meter OHC increase (light blue), 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue). From Nuccitelli et al. (2012).
So while CFCs might match surface temperature changes better than CO2 emissions over the past decade,
CO2 emissions better match the relevant metric – overall global heat accumulation. Since a global energy imbalance influences global heat content and not just surface temperatures, this by itself is sufficient to falsify Lu's hypothesis.
But let's dig into the details of the paper to see how Lu built his case and where he went wrong....
A paper just published in an obscure physics journal by the University of Waterloo's Qing-Bin Lu (2013) has drawn quite a bit of media attention for blaming global warming not on carbon dioxide, but rather on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs, which are also greenhouse gases). However, there are...
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