Elizabeth Grossman's Climate Chronicles

When you turn on the AC, what’s cooling you off is heating up the planet.

As temperatures rise, so do air conditioner sales, and what makes most of these 4 billion-plus machines cool indoor environments worldwide are HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), gases with global warming potentials thousands of times greater than CO2.

HFCs started out as environmentally preferable alternatives to ozone-depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons), now being phased out by the Montreal Protocol. Then scientists realized their true global warming potential. HFCs use is now increasing so rapidly that scientists warn that if not curtailed, greenhouse gas impacts of HFCs could undermine other efforts to curb global warming.

HFCs are so potent — atmospherically and politically — that the outcome of ongoing negotiations about their regulation could significantly affect both the rate of global warming and the course of international climate change legislation.

Like a household that has been living beyond its means, the world has been expending more greenhouse gas emitting energy than it can afford.

With the costs of profligate CO2 emissions increasingly apparent and less than 90 days until the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that will determine the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, early September has brought a number of new proposals for achieving carbon reductions.

Among these is a report from the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU) outlining what the council – an independent scientific advisory board – calls a “budget approach” to reducing CO2 emissions that in effect proposes putting the world on an emissions diet.

The budget approach, explains Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at Potsdam University and WBGU member, is based on the premise that there’s a limited amount – or fixed budget – of CO2 that can be released worldwide between now and 2050 if we’re to avoid raising global temperatures beyond a point that would cause irreversible climate change.

“The fundamental idea behind the budget approach,” says Rahmstorf, is that it ties reduction targets to total – or cumulative – rather than annual CO2 emissions.

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