IMAP Lunch Seminar: Should Anesthetics with Enormous Global Warming Potentials be Banned?

Since the first public use of anesthesia, on 16 October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital, advances in pharmacology have given anesthesiologists an ever-widening array of chemical tools. The most recent of these are fluorinated ethers, so-called F-gases, a prominent example being desflurane (C3H2F6O). Among its other properties, desflurane is a powerful greenhouse gas.

We assess the climate hazard attending the use of desflurane by computing the effect of its use, at scale, on global average temperature and compare it to its GWP-derived “CO2-equivalent.” Because carbon dioxide has an atmospheric lifetime of tens of thousands of years, its emissions linger in the atmosphere contributing to long-term warming. In contrast, desflurane has an atmospheric lifetime of fourteen years. Even if desflurane were used indefinitely in 300 million surgical procedures per year (the current worldwide annual total) its effect on global average temperature would never exceed 0.002°C, much smaller than the natural variation of temperature due to variations of solar insolation.

We conclude GWP is a misleading metric when quantifying the climate effects of short-lived climate pollutants such as desflurane. Calculations of global average temperature, as per the Paris Agreement, is a far superior method of weighing the influence of greenhouse gases on climate.

IMAP Senior Fellow Robert Kleinberg will present.

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