Obama, ChiComs agree to pointless greenhouse gas treaty

“Pointless greenhouse gas treaty” — sorry for the redundancy.

The WaPo reports:

The United States and China announced Friday they would seek to eliminate some of the world’s most potent greenhouse gases through the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the landmark treaty that successfully phased out ozone-depleting substances decades ago.

The move, announced at the Group of 20 summit in St. Petersburg, is significant because it provides a clear path for curbing a major contributor to global warming in the near term as world leaders grapple with the more challenging task of cutting carbon dioxide in the coming decades.

President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping said they would work to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) — a class of chemicals commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners — through the Montreal Protocol, even as they tried to make progress through the annual climate talks held by the United Nations. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change has yet to produce a broad, binding, global warming accord that many scientists say would be needed to limit the world’s growing carbon output.

But as the eminent 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]