Thursday, October 20, 2016

Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal

Isabel Caton October 21, 2016
Current Event AP Bio D block


Davenport, Coral. "Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal." The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Oct. 2016. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.


In this article “Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal” by Coral Davenport, she talks about the meeting on Saturday in Kigali Rwanda, in which negotiators from more than 170 different countries reached a legally binding accord to counter climate change by cutting the worldwide use of a powerful planet-warming chemical that is used in air-conditioners and refrigerators. This talk in Kigali was similar to the climate change accord forged in Paris last year, which was an agreement that included pledges by nearly every country to cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the fossil fuels that power vehicles, electric plants and factories. Instead the new Kigali deal has a single target: chemical coolants called hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used in air-conditioners and refrigerators.  HFCs are only a small percentage of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere but they function as a supercharged greenhouse gas, with 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “It is likely the single most important step we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet and limit the warming for generations to come.” This Kigali deal is a compromise between rich nations and poorer, hotter ones.  There was an agreement by the rich countries that they would help finance the transition of poor countries to the costlier replacement products. The Kigali deal includes specific targets and timetables to replace HFCs with more planet-friendly alternatives. Given the heat-trapping power of HFCs, scientists say “the Kigali accord will stave off an increase of atmospheric temperatures of nearly one degree fahrenheit.” That would be a major step toward “averting an atmospheric temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit”, the point at which many experts the the world will be locked into a future of rise sea levels, severe droughts and flooding, widespread food and water shortages, and more powerful hurricanes.
Greenhouse gases are important to absorb some of the energy and radiate it back towards the surface, and the rest is radiated into space. These play an important role in keeping the Earth’s surface warm but hydrofluorocarbons have 1,000 times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide. Which makes them increases the global temperature and is a major gas associated with climate change. Overall this deal is expected to lead to the reduction of 70 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which is two times the carbon pollution produced annually by the entire world. The final deal will divide the world economy into three tracks. The richest countries, including the United States and the European Union, will freeze the production and consumption of HFCs by 2018, reducing them to about 15 perfect of 2012 levels by 2036. A small group of the world’s hottest countries will have the most lenient schedule, freezing HFC use by 2028 and reducing it to 15 percent of 2025 levels by 2047. This will have a big impact on the generations to come in the future and will slow climate change.
This article was really helpful in understanding what happened in this meeting and also comparing this new deal to the one in Paris a few years ago. The author included many quotes from different people and countries who attended the meeting, which was helpful to understand how the countries feel about this new deal and how they are going to fix the issue and switch from HFCs to a new environmentally friendly gas. The author switched back and forth between the meeting in Kigali and meetings and other compromises in the past, which was helpful for understanding background but also confusing at times. But overall this article was very interesting and I would like to learn more about it once the situation is fixed in the future.

1 comment:

  1. Davenport, Coral. "Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal." The New York Times. The New York Times, 15 Oct. 2016. Web. 20 Oct. 2016.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/africa/kigali-deal-hfc-air-conditioners.html


    Isabel did an excellent job of responding to the article “Nations, Fighting Powerful Refrigerant That Warms Planet, Reach Landmark Deal” by Coral Davenport. I thought that she did a great job of briefly describing the context of the meeting in Kigali Rwanda and the agreement of 170 countries to cut the use of hydrofluorocarbons in an effort to combat climate change. I thought that she did an amazing job of defining hydrofluorocarbons and explaining their extreme environmental impact. It made her review even more informative and convincing. I also loved how she incorporated the quote by John Kerry in order to emphasize how important this accord is in averting the atmospheric temperature increase.
    Her response to the article was thorough and effective, but there are two places where she could improve it slightly. She included information concerning the HCF reduction percentages of various countries, but she didn’t describe how these countries would accomplish this. In her final paragraph, she complimented the author for describing the positions of different people and countries on the deal. However, Isabel didn’t really touch on this aspect of the meeting, which could help a reader to gain more perspective on the issue.
    From this article and its review, I learned that hydrofluorocarbons trap heat in atmosphere with 1000 times more potency than carbon dioxide. I never knew that there was a greenhouse gas that was so much more devastating than carbon dioxide and I can’t believe that the world has just made a deal to limit its production. Now that I have read Isabel’s review, I will be on the lookout for HCFs and I will make sure that my parents do not purchase any appliances that produce that gas into the atmosphere.

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