Exposing the Madness of Climate Experts with Tunnel Vision Who Cast Aside Our Health to Save An Unthreatened Planet

Readers will recall the insanity of supposed climate experts telling the world anesthesia gases represented a threat of overheating the planet, as Greg Wrightstone explained here. It was patently absurd proof of the Fatal Conceit, nicely defined here:

“The "fatal conceit" refers to the misguided belief that human beings can fully understand, control, and design complex social, economic, or natural systems through centralized planning or rational engineering, ignoring the spontaneous order that emerges from individual actions and decentralized decision-making. Hayek argued that this hubris—overestimating human knowledge and disregarding the limits of reason—leads to unintended consequences, inefficiency, and often disastrous outcomes.”

My simpler version is this:

Fatal conceit is the practice of experts assuming their experience and superior knowledge of one thing makes them an expert in all things and leads them to disregard any other experience but their own, which invariably leads to disastrous decisions.

Regardless how one defines it, we all, as they say, know it when we see it, and the UK agonizing over the global warming effects of anesthesia necessary to human health perfectly illustrates it. So, it’s critical to knock it down as soon as it appears. Wrightstone, together, with William Happer and Frits Byron Soepyan, all members of the CO2 Coalition, have done just that with this study.

The abstract summarizes the conclusion, but it’s reading some of the less heavy sections of the report, which follow:

Some members of the medical community have raised alarms about dangerous greenhouse warming due to the use of anesthetic gases. For instance, in a recent report of the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), we read:

“Desflurane is the inhaled anesthetic that is the most potent greenhouse gas, with a global warming potential (GWP100) of 2540, followed by isoflurane (539), nitrous oxide (273), and sevoflurane (144). However, clinical doses must also be considered.” (ASA Committee on Environmental Health, 2024)

The global warming potential (GWP) is a nearly irrelevant parameter for assessing whether the warming from anesthetic gases will be dangerous or not. In Section 8.7.1.2 of the 2013 document from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we find the following definition of the GWP in terms of the radiative forcings (RF) of various greenhouse gases:

“The Global Warming Potential (GWP) is defined as the time-integrated RF due to a pulse emission of a given component, relative to a pulse emission of an equal mass of CO2 (Figure 8.28a and formula). The GWP was presented in the First IPCC Assessment (Houghton et al., 1990), stating: ‘It must be stressed that there is no universally accepted methodology for combining all the relevant factors into a single global warming potential for greenhouse gas emissions. A simple approach has been adopted here to illustrate the difficulties inherent in the concept, …’” (Myhre et al., 2013)

As one can see in the statement above, even the IPCC is uneasy with the use of GWPs. Using relative values of the GWP to demonize anesthetic gases is a classic violation of a key principle of toxicology, first enunciated by Paracelsus in the early 1500s:

“Only the dose makes the poison.”

For example, metabolism of the small amounts of amygdalin in sweet almonds releases highly poisonous hydrogen cyanide into the human body. However, it would be absurd to ban the consumption of almonds because they release a harmlessly small dose of hydrogen cyanide.

Restricting the use of anesthetic gases in medicine is even more absurd. As we will quantify below, the warming from the release of anesthetic gases will be too small to measure under any plausible assumptions about the greenhouse gas physics or future release rates.

Slingo and Slingo (2021) have already pointed out how misleading GWPs are and how trivially small the radiative forcing from anesthetic gases is. They stated correctly:

“Much has been made of the high GWP of volatile anesthetic gases, but this is deeply misleading … This is why radiative forcings based on current concentrations (Table 1) is a fairer comparator of the potential impacts of different gases on the climate system.” (Slingo and Slingo, 2021)

In their pie chart of Figure 1, Varughese and Ahmed (2021) show that during the early 2010s in the United States, anesthetic gases represent no more than 0.1% of the emission of all greenhouse gases (excluding water vapor, H2O), including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and fluorinated gases.

In Table 1, we summarize the tiny warmings that can be expected from radiative forcing of the most important anesthetic gases: nitrous oxide, isoflurane, desflurane and sevoflurane. The warming will be in the order of a hundredth of a degree Celsius (°C) or smaller, too small to feel or measure.

That fact may be a sufficient takeaway message from this note…

Table 1: The predicted temperature increases due to the increasing presence of anesthetic gases in the atmosphere at the current rates of concentration increase (dC/dt)…

Conclusion

Based on the tiny amount of forecasted warming from anesthetic gases, any measures for curbing the emissions of these gases into the atmosphere are unnecessary and serve no useful environmental purpose.

Changes in the anesthetic gases that are used in medical procedures and their administration should be based on the health, safety and comfort of the patients.

The last part should be obvious, and the fact it was not for the global warmists casting aspersions on anesthesia is a demonstration of the fatal conceit like no other.

#Wrightstone #Happer #Anesthesia #Climate #UK #HumanHealth #Soepyan