First we had to give up (freebasing?) freon because it was eating a hole in the ozone layer. Now The New York Times tells us the European Union is banning R132a, the refrigerant currently used in auto air conditioners. You guessed it: it's a greenhouse gas. The most likely replacement? Carbon dioxide. Yep, the bane of environmentalists everywhere could be cooling off your BMW in a few years. Even though tests with other coolants are still underway, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and VW have all named CO2 as their refrigerant of choice. While the U.S. isn't considering banning R132a (yet), they're looking at other possibilities like R152a which is less of a global-warming threat. Each has its unique problems, though. R152a is slightly flammable, and carbon dioxide has to operate at five times the pressure of current systems. Anyone want to place any bets on how long either of them lasts before they get banned too?
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I cannot live without air con in my car. If they ban R132a (which is the refridgerant used in my Toyota Yaris) I don’t know whether it’ll accept any other coolant?
I am a committed environmentalist. I don’t use my car unless I need to, I drive a small car which produces low emissions, I walk quite a bit, I recycle, etc.
But the next time some hippie tells me “We don’t own the world, we’re just borrowing it from future generations” I’m going to tell him to frig himself and frig the future generations and tear off in my car (in low gear) with the air conditioning on AND the windows down!
I never wanted children, anyway……!
Having spent more than a few summers driving the autobahn w/Onkel Klaus…the acrid smell of man pheromone permeating the humid air…I don’t believe this will have much of an impact over there. I suspect A/C and A/T go hand in hand, which means that maybe 25%(?) of vehicles have the option. Thus, how major of a deal is this? Now on the other hand, if we were talking about cigarette lighters, the continent would be up in arms.
Shouldn’t that be R-134a?
Europeans are backward when it comes to A/C. That’s why the last heat wave in France killed over 10000.
Leave it to them to combat global warming with *the* global warming gas!
The irony of this situation leaves me speechless. Mostly with internal hysterical laughter.
If ever you wanted proof that the fanatical left is using “climate change” as a lever to reintroduce communism in another disguise, this is a typical manoeuvre.
Every car I rent over there has A/C and every one I know in Europe is already addicted. Try doing without A/C in the South of France in July for instance.
After years of change over trauma, starting in 1993, R134A is now a phenomenally reliable system, so now we have to make another change simply for the purpose of discouragement.
Just like global warming, I’ll bet the science behind this is as questionable as ever.
Just like global warming, I’ll bet the science behind this is as questionable as ever.
The reasons for switching to carbon dioxide may be a little tenuous, but for anyone with some legitimate knowledge, the science behind global warming is rock-solid. That debate is history.
Mad Scientist:
The reasons for switching to carbon dioxide may be a little tenuous, but for anyone with some legitimate knowledge, the science behind global warming is rock-solid. That debate is history.
That debate is history? I don’t think so. And the science isn’t rock solid. How can the science be rock solid when we can’t completely understand Earth’s climate in the first place?
R-134a has a global warming potential of 1200. Replacing it with CO2 is literally a thousand times better.
the science behind global warming is rock-solid. That debate is history.
It REALLY isn’t. I suppose if you say that strictly global warming is occurring, that would be correct. But anytime it’s brought up, people mean “human caused warming”. This is based on very poor “science” indeed. The earth’s climate is a heinously complex dynamic system. We have no real idea what the primary influences of change even are.
The idea of scientific consensus is BS as well. There is plenty of agreement from many Sociologists, Economists, and the all important Comm Professors. But there is little consensus from real, true climatologists and geologists, or people who have studied things like…Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer. The hypothesis that human emissions cause global weather change has been swept up by special interests, and academics who want to be in the spotlight and pad their resume with the newest “hot topic.” Academia, and research science is a world apart from what “civilians” think it is. Pride, arrogance, ruthless competition, and scoring grant money are far greater influences than you imagine. Sadly, search for truth and forwarding humanity often takes a backseat.
Right off the bat, people have been putting greenhouse gasses in elevated levels for 100 years, 150 tops. Meanwhile the warming trend has gone on for around 200 years. To claim humans are responsible is kind of silly. Especially since climate change is a normal occurence on Earth. The average temperature has never stayed constant, and it never will. Several degrees of temperature change over 100 years is NORMAL. There are forces at work here that are so much more powerful than humans, like the sun, or our own magnetic field, just to name two. Speaking of our insignificance, we don’t even release 4% of the carbon dioxide released annually. Additionally, there are other gases, like methane, and water vapor (take that, hydrogen car!) that, per molecule, are far more powerful greenhouse gasses than CO2. A large volcano going off for a few days releases more greenhouse gasses than all humans do in a year.
And as far as melting icecaps and mountaintops? Yes, they melt. They have been, slowly for around 10,000 years, when the last major Ice Age ended. We just haven’t been looking that closely until now.
Little more food for thought? Data from the Mars Probes is showing that mars is experiencing a recent warming trend that is similar to Earth’s, and for a similar period of time. Same period of time we have noticed a larger number of sunspots… I blame the Ford Excursion. ;-)
There is a parameter in refrigeration engineering called the refrigerant coefficient of performance (COP). R-12 has a COP of 4.7; that of CO2 (which has a refrigerant number, 744) is 2.6. It takes almost twice the energy to achieve a given level of cooling, all other things being equal, with CO2 than it does with R-12. Add weight because the pressures used with CO2 are much higher than with R-12 or R-134a and you have a heavier, worse performing, more energy-sucking cooling system.
How green is that?
^ The problem is, 95% of people, even in the first world have such poor grasp of science, that they can’t understand that.
They don’t get how having to use an extra few HP to run “benign” A/C gas results in hundreds, if not thousands, of lbs of extra exhaust. And all this to prevent the POSSIBLITY of a couple of pounds of R-134a leakage.
Either way, most likely improved Thermoelectric cooling technology will be used.
Did we ever see any proof that freon was really causing any problems? I heard the whole (hole?) thing was a hoax pulled off by a chemical company that had the patent on the replacement. I bet the patent ran out, so we need something new.
Ah, MrUnexpected, it is even worse than that. The R-134a air conditioner probably uses more than one hp continuously (two when it is on, none when it’s off). SFC for a gasoline engine is about 0.5 lb/hp/hr, of that 0.5 lb of fuel, 0.4 lb or so (close to 6/7) is carbon. That carbon will combine with about 32/12 * 0.4 lb of oxygen to produce just over a pound of CO2. At 60 mph, you will produce an extra pound of carbon dioxide for every sixty miles you drive if you exchange refrigerant from R-134a to CO2 – NOT counting the added weight you drag along, or the hazard of running a good-sized reservoir at several hundred psi.
KBW‘s gleeful announcement that CO2 is “a thousand times better” than R-134a turns to gloom if your car leaks less than a pound of R-134a in 60,000 miles (that’s the break-even point by KBW‘s numbers). My old Subaru uses R-12, and it hasn’t leaked a pound of R-12 in 245,000 miles. My new Subaru uses R-134a and it hasn’t leaked a pound or anywhere near it, in 41,000 miles.
Landcrusher, the halogens (chlorine, bromine, fluorine) have a habit of gathering the third oxygen atom from ozone and transporting it to another ozone molecule, thereby destroying ozone. Bromine’s probably the worst offender, which is why it’s so hard to get a Halon (TM) fire suppression system licensed these days.
I had heard that there were concerns about potential environmental drawbacks to R134A. One CFC-free auto refrigerant being used in Europe called R12A (you can Google it) contains propane and butane. Evidently, this compound is chemically similar to Freon (the old auto refrigerant R12). Some concern over that fact that both propane and butane are flammable, although I understand the amounts involved aren’t all that dangerous. To be continued…
Very well said MrUnexpected. What you say is true if not very PC to say it. The so called science behind the current PC version of Global warmer is at best extremely suspect and certainly not bulletproof. If everyone left the planet tonight and before we left we shut down every piece of machinery on Earth it would not make a hill of beans worth of difference to the current warming trend. So much for conventional wisdom. It reminds me of the theory of evolution. It is accepted as fact yet nobody has come remotely close (oxymoron?) to proving it (and they never will!!!). How’s that for an off-the-cuff, politically incorrect assertion? Yep, I’ll go down in flames for that one :-)
For an interesting discussion regarding human-caused global warming, read Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear. While a fictional story, it does include many factual discussions about climate change and the environment. One interesting thing in there is that it’s not necessarily the earth that’s getting warmer, but that the climate reporting centers happen to be near cities. Cities, being made largely of concrete, retain more heat longer than, say, a forest. If the reporting centers are near big cities, then their readings will reflect a localized urban heat trend, not a global one. Indeed, Crichton showed several temperature graphs of New York state – New York city rose a few degrees over a given period of time, while the surrounding area had a decrease in temperature of a few degrees over the same period of time.
Also, he mentions that while glaciers are melting in North America, those in the Himalayas are doing very well, growing a decent amount each year.
And if there really was catastrophic global warming as propaganda-ed by tree hugging hippies, then why is it currently -20 here in eastern Ontario, with about a foot and a half of snow on the ground? Sounds like a typical Canadian winter, not something to be expected if the entire globe was warmed up. Actually, I could go for some warming right now…
jet_silver Your analysis is incorrect. COP is generally a function of the entire system and not simply the refrigerant used.
The SAE believes that CO2 air conditioner performance is equal or better than R134.
http://www.sae.org/altrefrigerant/presentations/prest-koehler.pdf
Quite frankly, I believe the society of automotive engineers’ analysis more than yours.
lprocter1982– “Global warming” is a bit of a misnomer. “Climate change” is a more accurate description of what’s going on. The reason people call it “warming” is because the most apparent, immediate and obvious effect is shrinking ice caps due to higher average global temperatures. One effect this would have is, when a bunch of ice melts, the Atlantic ocean loses it’s salinity and slows down or stops the north Atlantic current that carries warm water (and warm air above it), Northern Europe (which has generally warmer weather than north american countries of the same latitude) will fall into an ice age and revitalize the skiing tourism industry.
Factor in the possibility of global dimming and we’ve got a nice mess.
If I remember correctly, Australia uses the flammable refrigerant in their cars.
So, was it always about “climate change”, or is that just the latest version of the “consensus” since it doesn’t appear that they can sustain the idea of “warming”. And is the “consensus among physical scientists who actually study the climate, or is it among anyone with a few letters behind their name? Seems to me that everytime I hear about “global warming” it is from a hack with some strange degree, but everytime I hear someone debumking it, they are a meteorologist.
I will be worried when the climate stops changing. That is a sure sign of something awful about to happen.
Somewhere within all of the politics of climate change, there is a grain of truth, albeit based on incomplete knowledge. Sure hope (for future generations) that the “righties” are “right”.
Ummm Freon-12 was most definitely attacking Ozone, and almost certainly attacking atmospheric Ozone. It is a pretty easy experiment to run. SCIENCE
If you have some left over R12 (a full can is/was worth a fair bit) and some method of generating ozone (be careful) you can run the test yourself, I don’t recommend that though.
The article is pretty disingenuous though, R12 was replaced because it does a real bit of harm not because of CO2 equivalent. That tidbit isn’t mentioned until nearish the end.
You just aren’t thinking outside the box…
Ban A/C. Drive Naked! : – )
I’ve had the priviledge of riding in a RHD Hydrogen FCV Toyota Highlander with a CO2 A/C System. Worked dandy. Odd thing was the headliner Oxygen Sensors…if the evaporator leaks CO2 into the cabin, A/C cuts out.
The respected British journal New Scientist in a recent issue lists 26 different misconceptions put forward by “skeptics” on climate change. Some of these are funny like blaming cosmic rays or sunspots. But the most common is a weak attempt to appear “objective” ie. to promote the idea that “many scientists” dispute the evidence for these events. Here is an example of what NS has to say against this.
Climate change sceptics sometimes claim that many leading scientists question climate change. Well, it all depends on what you mean by “many” and “leading”. For instance, in April 2006, 60 “leading scientists” signed a letter urging Canada’s new prime minister to review his country’s commitment to the Kyoto protocol.
This appears to be the biggest recent list of sceptics. Yet many, if not most, of the 60 signatories are not actively engaged in studying climate change: some are not scientists at all and at least 15 are retired.
Compare that with the dozens of statements on climate change from various scientific organisations around the world representing tens of thousands of scientists, the consensus position represented by the IPCC reports and the 11,000 signatories to a petition condemning the Bush administration’s stance on climate science.
The fact is that there is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community about global warming and its causes. There are some exceptions, but the number of sceptics is getting smaller rather than growing.
Even the position of perhaps the most respected sceptic, Richard Lindzen of MIT, is not that far off the mainstream: he does not deny it is happening but thinks future warming will not be nearly as great as most predict.
Of course, just because most scientists think something is true does not necessarily mean they are right. But the reason they think the way they do is because of the vast and growing body of evidence. A study in 2004 looked at the abstracts of nearly 1000 scientific papers containing the term “global climate change” published in the previous decade. Not one rejected the consensus position. One critic promptly claimed this study was wrong – but later quietly withdrew the claim.
The fact that global warming is an issue does however mean that every government “solution” to this … like Kyoto … should be cheered. Most conservatives, or should I say neo-cons to be fair, deliberately equate “liberal” solutions with any issue, important or not, they don’t like … which they then also denounce as “liberal”. To the poster who mentioned Michael Crichton. This is the guy who said that Africanized bees were a hoax. I have a friend in Tucson who says there are nine companies in that city who do nothing else but fumigate for these pests. A woman a block from his house was nearly stung to death, etc.. Overall most of the junk coming from neoconservatives depends on a decreasing level of literacy in order to gain acceptance. Eventually there will a price to be paid for this ignorance.