What's the most important single thing we can do to combat global warming?

According to Project Drawdown, a hugely ambitious international research effort across a multitude of disciplines, it isn't vegetarianism (number 4), solar farms (number 8) or electric vehicles (number 26). It's something often overlooked, if not largely unknown: Better management of chemicals used in refrigeration.

Chemicals commonly used in refrigerators and air-conditioners are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the atmosphere. It's essential that they do not leak, and are properly disposed of.

All ways to combat climate change must be engaged, as rigorously as possible. But the Drawdown study, whose findings are now featured in a book edited by eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken, should make a massive contribution to directing anti-warming efforts and to making them more productive. In light of both the breadth and the depth of its research, its conclusions must be considered definitive.

"Drawdown is the point in time when the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases begins to decline on a year-to-year basis," the study's authors say. "Project Drawdown’s research program has developed realistic, solution-specific models, technical assessments, and policy memos projecting the financial and climate impacts of existing solutions deployed at scale over the next thirty years."

Noted Tom Athanasiou in The Nation: The project "will give you the best kind of hope, the kind that balances realism with radical vision... The point here is only to show that...such an effort can do more than merely succeed; that it can succeed well, and open into futures that we can actually bear to contemplate.”

For more information and to order the book: http://www.drawdown.org

Curious? Here are Drawdown's ten top recommendations:

1 Refrigerant Management

2 Wind Turbines (Onshore)

3 Reduced Food Waste

4 Plant-Rich Diet

5 Tropical Forests

6 Educating Girls

7 Family Planning

8 Solar Farms

9 Silvopasture

10 Rooftop Solar

––By Jen Ellis-Worther