AN INDUSTRIAL chemical being used in ever larger quantities to make flat-screen TVs may be making global warming worse. However, because it's not covered by the Kyoto protocol, nobody knows by how much. The gas was first introduced as a measure to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but a prominent atmospheric chemist this week warned it could now be having the opposite effect.
The gas is nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). As a greenhouse gas it is 17,000 times as potent as carbon dioxide, molecule-for-molecule, yet is not covered by Kyoto because it was made in tiny amounts when the protocol was agreed in 1997.
Even today, no one is measuring how much reaches the atmosphere. The one certainty is that it is accumulating. In a new study, Michael Prather of the University of California, Irvine, calculates that it has a half-life in the atmosphere of 550 years.
NF3 production is "exploding", says ...
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