Back to having surgery under local anesthesia.
When doctors want their patients asleep during surgery, they gently turn the gas tap. But anesthetic gasses have a global warming potential as high as a refrigerant that is on its way to be banned in the European Union. Yet there is no obligation to report anesthetic gasses along with other greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, refrigerants and laughing gas.
One kilogram of anesthetic gas affects the climate as much as 1,620 kilos of CO2. That has been shown by a recent study carried out by chemists from University of Copenhagen and NASA in collaboration with anesthesiologists from the University of Michigan Medical School. The amount of gas needed for a single surgical procedure is not high, but in the US alone surgery related anesthetics affected the climate as much as would one million cars.
Analyses of the anesthetics were carried out by Ole John Nielsen. He is a professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and he's got an important message for doctors. "We studied three different gasses in regular use for anesthesia, and they're not equally harmful," explains Nielsen. All three are worse than CO2, but where the mildest ones -- isoflurane and sevoflurane -- have global warming potentials of 210 and 510 respectively, desflurane the most harmful will cause 1,620 times as much global warming as an equal amount of CO2, explains the professor.
"The anesthesiologist told me that the gas used is what we chemist know as a halogenated compound. That's the same family of compound as the freon that was famously eating the ozone layer back in the eighties," says Andersen.
Anesthetic Gases Heats Climate as Much as One Million Cars, New Research Shows
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