Warmists want President Obama and Chinese President Xi to lead a junk science-based effort to ban hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) under the Montreal Protocol.
Writing in The Hill, Durwood Zaelke and Paul Bledsoe claim:
HFCs, chemicals used as coolants and to make insulating foams, are an ideal initial target. They are the fastest growing climate pollutant in both the US and China, and in many other countries. Reducing them can provide the single biggest, fastest, most reliable, and cheapest piece of climate protection available to the world today.
How big? Phasing down HFC will prevent the equivalent of 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050, providing about ten times more climate protection than the UN climate treaty has provided so far. This will avoid a half a degree Celsius of warming by the end of the century, a significant part of what is needed to keep warming from exceeding the two degree Celsius red-line.
But as Fred Singer pointed out in 2010:
So now HFCs must be eradicated, because a single molecule of HFC produces many thousand times the greenhouse effect of a molecule of CO2. What they don’t tell you, of course, is that the total forcing from the HFCs is less than one percent of that of CO2, according to the IPCC (see page 141). So “slaying the dragon” amounts to slaying a mouse — or something even smaller. But you can bet that it will be trumpeted as a tremendous achievement and will likely invigorate the search for other mice that can be slain. [Emphasis added]