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Who We Are Mission Values Personnel History Internships Donate Blog Recent GHG News Home Inside the Institute What is a Global Warming Potential? And which one do I use? Quick Links Courses Membership Mission ? Testimonials ? Who We Train InsidetheInstitute Jun 28
What is a Global Warming Potential? And which one do I use?

Inside the Institute Posted by Michael Gillenwater -5 Comments This question is not as silly as it may seem, and is so fundamental to GHG management that many practitioners are probably afraid to seek clarification out of fear of looking bad. Since not everyone in the field has studied atmospheric chemistry (I admit I have, but wouldnt expect the range of folks working on these issues to have the same background), Ill try and give a primer here on it. But first you should read my previous blog post on greenhouse gases. Im going to skip over the underlying physics and chemistry, because it is not necessary to engage at that level of scientific technicality to be an intelligent user of GWP values. (If you want to dig into the science more, you can refer to the latest IPCC assessment report published in 2007 see Chapter 2 of the Working Group I report.) Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) are a quantified measure of the globally averaged relative radiative forcing impacts of a particular greenhouse gas. It is defined as the cumulative radiative forcing both direct and indirect effects integrated over a period of time from the emission of a unit mass of gas relative to some reference gas (IPCC 1996). Carbon dioxide (CO2) was chosen by the IPCC as this reference gas and its GWP is set equal to one (1). So to be clear, GWP values are applied to units of mass (e.g., kilograms, pounds, metric tons, etc.) not to units
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of volume (e.g., cubic meters, cubic feet, liters). There are three key factors that determine the GWP value of a GHG: the gases absorption of infrared radiation, where along the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e., what wavelengths) the gas absorbs radiation, and the atmospheric lifetime of the gas We typically only use GWP values for gases that have a long atmospheric lifetime (i.e., in years). Because only these gases last long enough in the atmosphere to mix evenly and spread throughout the atmosphere to form a relatively uniform concentration. GWP values are meant to be global, as the name implies. So if a gas is short-lived and does not have a global concentration because it is destroyed quickly and emitted in different amounts in different places, then it cant really have a GWP. Specifically, the gases with relatively long atmospheric lifetimes that tend to be evenly distributed throughout the atmosphere, and therefore have global average concentrations, are CO2, CH4, N2O, HFCs, PFCs, and SF6. The short-lived gases such as water vapor, carbon monoxide, tropospheric ozone, other ambient air pollutants (e.g., NOx, and NMVOCs), and tropospheric aerosols (e.g., SO2 products and black carbon) vary spatially, and consequently it is difficult to quantify their global radiative forcing impacts. Some GWP values may also account for indirect as well as direct effects. Indirect radiative forcing occurs when chemical transformations involving the original gas produce a gas(es) that is/are also a greenhouse gas, or when a gas influences other radiatively important processes such as the atmospheric lifetimes of other gases. In sum, the higher the GWP value the more infrared radiation the gas will tend to absorb over its lifetime in the atmosphere. Now, there are three more complications to this story. The first is that gases will absorb certain wavelengths of radiation. GHGs each absorb in a given window of the spectrum. The more that window is filled up, the less there is to absorb. So, as concentrations of certain gases increase they can saturate that wavelength, leaving no more radiation for additional concentrations of gas in the atmosphere to absorb.
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The second complication is one that occasionally trips people up. Remember above when we defined GWP by saying cumulative radiative forcingintegrated over a period of time? Well, that means that we have to define a time period for the integration to occur. You have to know what the integration period is to make sure you are using the correct GWP. The typical periods that the IPCC publishes are 20, 100, and 500 years. Now, to be clear, everyone pretty much universally uses 100 year GWP values, so you often never see the time period even cited. But occasionally, someone will use something different, not realizing that they are breaking convention. It is also possible to compute an infinite time horizon GWP value, which would basically mean that accounted for every bit of radiative forcing of every molecule of gas as long as it existed in the atmosphere. The last complication relates to the fact that the IPCC keeps updating its GWP values with each of its major scientific assessment reports. It makes sense to update GWP values as our scientific understanding improves. However, the problem is that people are using and making commitments based on GWP values while these revisions are taking place. So, say a company or a country says it will reduce its emissions by 10% and achieves that goal. Then all of a sudden GWP values change and now they no longer make the goal if new GWP values are used (due to the mix of different GHGs they emit and reduce). It would be like moving the
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net after you already kicked the ball towards the goal. For this reason, the Kyoto Protocol fixed the use of GWP values published by the IPCC in 1996 in its Second Assessment Report. Since then the IPCC has updated its GWP values twice, once in 2001, and again in 2007. The result has been a proliferation of GWP values out there that leads to a lot of confusion. Specifically, the Parties to the UNFCCC said: In addition to communicating emissions in units of mass, Parties may choose also to use global warming potentials (GWPs) to reflect their inventories and projections in carbon dioxide-equivalent terms, using information provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Second Assessment Report. Any use of GWPs should be based on the effects of the greenhouse gases over a 100-year time horizon. In addition, Parties may also use other time horizons. (FCCC/CP/1996/15/Add.1) The major causes for the IPCCs updates to GWP values involved new laboratory or radiative transfer results, improved atmospheric lifetime estimates, and improved calculations of CO2 radiative forcing and CO2 response function. When the radiative forcing of CO2 is updated, then the GWPs of the other gases relative to CO2 also change. The result of the varying time periods and the regular updates by the IPCC is a complicated state of affairs. This table presents GWP values for the most common GHGs (there are many more if we listed all the HFCs, PFCs and other trace gases). As you can see in this table, each gas has number of GWP values that you could chose. But the truth is, contrary to what a lay person might expect, we typically only use values over a 100 year time period, even though some gases have lifetimes of thousands of years. And we use the old 1995 values, so all the climate change programs and policies around the world, including the Kyoto Protocol, are consistent in their emissions accounting (these GWP values are highlighted in red in the table). Table: Global Warming Potential Values from the IPCC for some key GHGs
GWP time horizon Lifetime (years) 20 years 100 years 500 years
1 Carbon dioxide Complex 1 1
1 1 1
1 1 1
12 Methane 12 12
72 62 56
25 23 21
7.6 7 6.5
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114 Nitrous oxide 114 120
289 275 280
298 296 310
153 156 170
270 HFC-23 260 264
12,000 14,800 12,200 9,400 9,100 12,000 10,000 11,700 9,800
14 HFC-134a 13.8 13.8
3,830 3,300 3,400
1,430 1,300 1,300
435 400 420
50,000 CF4 (PFC) 50,000 50,000
5,210 3,900 4,400
7,390 5,700 6,500
11,200 8,900 10,000
3,200 Sulfur hexafluoride 3,200 3,200
16,300 22,800 32,600 15,100 22,200 32,400 16,300 23,900 34,900
Row 1: 2007 IPCC AR4 (See Chapter 2 of Working Group I report) Row 2: 2001 IPCC TAR (See Chapter 6 of Working Group I report) Row 3: 1996 IPCC SAR (See Chapter 2 of the Working Group I report) To wrap things up for the sake of being thorough, the relationship between mass of a gas and mass of CO2 Eq. can be expressed as follows: mass CO2 Eq. = (mass of gas) x (GWP) Where: mass CO2 Eq. = mass (e.g., metric tons) of Carbon Dioxide Equivalents GWP = Global Warming Potential
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So the calculation is easy. Just multiply the mass of your gas by its GWP value to get CO2 equivalent emissions. Be sure to label the resulting emissions not as CO2, but as CO2-equivalents. And in case you were wondering, according to the IPCC, GWPs typically have an uncertainty of roughly 35 percent, though some GWPs have larger uncertainty than others. Previous post in this series. Share and Enjoy:
5 Comments
Tom Wigley Commented On June 29th, 2010 at 16:16 Although built into the Kyoto Protocol, GWPs have serious flaws. Users should be aware of these flaws. The three papers listed below are my own work, but there are many other (including more recent) papers on the topic. Wigley, T.M.L., 1998: The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4 and climate implications. Geophysical Research Letters 25, 22852288. Smith, S.J. and Wigley, T.M.L., 2000: Global warming potentials: 1. Climatic implications of emissions reductions. Climatic Change 44, 445457. Smith, S.J. and Wigley, T.M.L., 2000: Global warming potentials: 2. Accuracy. Climatic Change 44, 459-469. Michael Gillenwater Commented On July 11th, 2010 at 16:44 Tom, I was hoping that someone would open up the debate over whether GWPs, in their current form, are the best index to use for GHG emissions accounting. I encourage readers and members to look at the papers Toms references and give your thoughts on the topic. Derik Broekhoff Commented On July 22nd, 2010 at 10:07 Michael, Excellent article (as always). To amplify on Toms comment, here is an excerpt from the recently published National Research Council report, Stabilization Targets for Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Concentrations (available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877.html): Insofar as it is perceived that control of methane or black carbon may be technically easier or less economically disruptive than controlling CO2 emissions, mitigation of the short-lived warming influences has sometimes been thought of as a way of buying time to put CO2 emission controls into place. This is a fallacy. While one does buy a rapid reduction by reducing methane or black carbon emissions, this has little or no effect on the long term climate, which is essentially controlled by CO2 emissions, because of the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere. The effect of mitigation of methane and black carbon is thus to trim the peak warming rather than limit the long-term warming to which the Earth is subjected. If the early action to mitigate methane emissions were done instead of actions that could have reduced net cumulative carbon emissions,
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the long term CO2 concentration would be increased as a consequence. Peak trimming in that case would come at the expense of an increased warming that will persist for millennia. Carbon emission control and short term forcing agent control are two separate control knobs that affect entirely distinct aspects of the Earths climate, and should not be viewed as substituting for one another. This certainly calls into question the notion of using CH4 reductions to offset CO2 emissions. My only observation is that the idea of reducing CH4 instead of CO2 implies a predetermined budget for emissions reductions, within which we are making this tradeoff. In reality, we dont have such a budget (yet), and it could be reasonably argued that if we exclude CH4 offsets from a cap-and-trade program, for example, caps would be set accordingly higher, meaning there is not necessarily a 1-for-1 tradeoff. In other words, allowing CH4 (and certain other non-CO2) offsets should be seen as means to achieving short-term avoidance of peak warming, not as substiting CH4 reductions for CO2. One hopes that policymakers will explicitly recognize this, however, in setting overall emissions limits (By the way, the longevity of CO2 in the atmosphere also has implications for whether temporary storage of C (e.g., through sequestration in trees or soils) can be considered an offset to CO2 emissions a topic for another post?) Karen Henk Commented On November 1st, 2010 at 15:45 We are refining a standards document that currently includes references to the GWP of a given manufactured product. I have seen precedents to this, studies measuring the GWP of pavement or the GWP of various cook stoves, but this seems to be an improper use of the term. Is there any context in which it would be appropriate to measure or reference the GWP or GWP impact of a manufactured product (rather than a GHG)? Pablo Berrutti Commented On June 1st, 2011 at 16:14 This is a very helpful article and conversation thank you. As an investor I think from a bottom-up (company level) perspective comparability trumps accuracy i.e. even where there is debate about the accuracy of GWP, I would prefer to see companies use the same GWP when reporting CO2-e than go their our own way (e.g. because they think the 2007 updates are superior). However, companies should report both CO2-e and breakdown by gas so further analysis is possible. The discussion around choosing reductions in methane vs C02 is an interesting one and not something I have heard before. Are you suggesting that it is better to allow landfill (and other sources) to continue emitting CH4 rather than capturing the CH4 and burning it for energy use (which creates C02)?
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