The title here should strike a familiar theme for most readers. Climate forcings do not just include CO 2 (other greenhouse gases, aerosols, land use, the sun, the orbit and volcanoes all contribute), and the impact of human emissions often has non-climatic effects on biology and ecosystems.

First up last week was a call from Michael Prather and colleagues that the production of a previously neglected greenhouse gas (NF 3 ) was increasing and could become a significant radiative forcing. This paper was basically an update of calculations done for the IPCC combined with new information about the production of this non-Kyoto gas.

Most of the media stories that picked this up focused on the use of this gas in a particular manufacturing process – flat screen TVs. Thus the headlines almost all read something like “Flat-screen TVs cause global warming”! (see here, here, here etc.). Unfortunately, very few of the headline writers read the small print.

NF 3 is indeed a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO 2 (as are methane, CFCs and SF 6 etc.), but because it is much less prevalent, the net radiative forcing (as with other Kyoto gases) is much smaller. Unfortunately, no-one has any measures of the concentration of NF 3 in the atmosphere. This is likely to be increasing, since production has stepped up rapidly in recent years, but the amount of gas that escapes to the air is unknown. Manufacturers claim that it is only a very small percentage – but historically such claims have not always been very reliable. However, it is almost certain that NF 3 has not caused a significant amount of global warming (yet).

The one issue that many stories did get wrong was in the comparison with coal. Prather’s paper compared the effect of the entire global production of NF 3 being released into the atmosphere with the CO 2 impact of one coal-fired power station. Since that is the maximum estimate of the current effect, and only matches a single power-station, the subtlety of the comparison got a little lost on the way to “Flat screen TVs ‘worse than coal’” story….

Needless to say, no-one should be throwing away their flat screen TVs because of this (it’s not in the use of the TV that causes a problem), but manufacturers will likely need to step up monitoring of NF 3 leakage or switch to an alternative process which some have already done.

The second story getting some attention, is the ocean acidification issue. As we’ve discussed previously, the increased take up in the oceans of human-released CO 2 is rapidly increasing the acidity (lowering the pH) of the oceans, making it more difficult for many carbonate-producing organisms to produce calcite or aragonite. These organisms include corals, coccolithophores, foraminfera, shell fish etc.

Both of these issues are relevant to the ongoing climate change discussion and it’s good to see the media picking up (albeit imperfectly) on these ancillary discussions. But as with the “North Pole” lightning rod discussed last week, there always needs to be a hook before something gets wide press (the ‘tyranny of the news peg’ as ably described by Andy Revkin). In the first case, there was a link to a popular consumer item and in the second, there has been a concerted effort to get the ocean acidification issue higher up the agenda.

The fact of the matter is that most of what goes on in the sciences is completely (and usually correctly) well below the radar of the public at large. But when there are discoveries and issues that do have public policy ramifications, getting the public to pay attention often requires finding just these kinds of resonances. Now if there was only a way to make sure the story underneath was accurate….