Net Zero Health Care - The Unhinged Fanaticism Of The NHS And The BBC's Misinformation
NHS Scotland bans anaesthetic gas Desflurane because of climate change
It gets crazier. With each passing week, the global warming fanatics become ever more unhinged and ever more destructive in their puritanical quest for Net Zero emissions. The latest insanity is the decision by NHS Scotland to ban Desflurane, an effective and safe anaesthetic gas which has been used in operating theatres since the 1990s.
Barking. Trust SNP-led Sturgeon’s Scotland to get in there first though. World-beating craziness:
Scotland has become the first country in the world to stop its hospitals using the anaesthetic desflurane because of the threat it poses to the environment.
NHS data suggests the gas, used to keep people unconscious during surgery, has a global warming potential 2,500 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Banning it in Scotland - from its peak use in 2017 - would cut emissions equal to powering 1,700 homes a year.
NHS England are going to do the same thing in 2024, so it’s not just the Scots, it’s mad dogs and Englishmen too. Talking of mad dogs barking:
Dr Kenneth Barker, anaesthetist and clinical lead for Scotland's national green theatres programme, said he was shocked to find the anaesthetic drug he had used for more than a decade for many major and routine operations was so harmful to the environment.
"I realised in 2017 that the amount of desflurane we used in a typical day's work as an anaesthetist resulted in emissions equivalent to me driving 670 miles that day," he said.
"I decided to stop using it straight away and many fellow anaesthetists have got on board.
"When you are faced with something as obvious as this and with the significance it has to the environment - I am very glad we have got to this stage."
Dr Barker. How very apt! You just can’t make this stuff up.
Those are pretty bold claims about Desflurane emissions being the equivalent of powering 1700 homes in a year or driving 670 miles a day, so let’s dig into them a bit deeper shall we. I’ve never been a fan of climate model enthusiast Dame Julia Slingo, former chief scientist at the Met Office, but what she has to say here, in the most fanatically warmist media rag on the planet, does at least sound sensible. It appears that her sister is an anaesthetist, so together they should know what they are talking about:
We note with interest your correspondence on the climate effects of anaesthetic gases (Letters, 26 October). However, as a climate scientist and an anaesthetist we feel compelled to put this into perspective.
Today, climate change is happening because the Earth is experiencing a change in its radiative forcing – in this case from increasing accumulations of, principally, carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Anaesthetic gases are indeed greenhouse gases, but the radiative forcing that they exert on the planet is vanishingly small compared with CO2 (0.00021Wm-2 versus 1.68Wm-2).
It is tempting to express the climate effects of anaesthetic gases in terms of equivalent emissions of CO2. However, this misses two critical steps – the translation of emissions into radiative forcing, and the translation of radiative forcing into an impact on our climate. Both steps are immensely complex. Even for an abundant, well-mixed and long-lived gas like CO2 we are still not certain how sensitive our global and regional climate will be. For anaesthetic gases, any impact of its tiny emissions and radiative forcing on our climate system will, quite frankly, be “lost in translation”.
Oh dear. Scotland the Timorous appears to be frightened out of its wits by the ‘environmental damage’ being caused by the vanishingly wee warming effect of anaesthetic gases. Does the wee lassie in charge (soon not to be) not read the Guardian? Surely, every extreme left wing neo-Marxist SNP politician at Holyrood reads the Guardian? Even Jacob Rees Mogg reads the Guardian and he writes for it too, telling readers how he’s not the Net Zero sceptic he’s portrayed to be and is really a planet-loving Greenie at heart!
Slingo and Slingo are right about the absolutely miniscule radiative forcing which can be attributed to Desflurane:
Desflurane emissions in 2014 accounted for 0.13 milliwatts per square meter of radiative forcing globally. It’s important to realise that this is from global emissions of this anaesthetic gas. The contribution from the NHS in England, Scotland and Wales is but a tiny fraction of the total, so our NHS nutters’ decision to unilaterally ban Desflurane in order to ‘save the planet from dangerously overheating’ is even more absurd! Also, look at the atmospheric concentration: 0.3 parts per trillion! As a comparison, CO2 atmospheric concentration is 420 parts per million and a moderate global warming scenario, where the world adopts significant GHG emissions reductions, would result in radiative forcing of 4.5W per square meter by the end of the century. This is 34,600 times greater than the hypothetical radiative forcing from Desflurane in 2014! But as Slingo & Slingo point out, it’s not as simple as this and you can’t directly compare the warming contribution from GHGs with that from anaesthetic gases.
But the insanity goes deeper as you look down the rabbit hole, because it turns out that anaesthetic gases are also powerful ozone destroying chemicals, so it’s not just a miniscule amount of global warming that we have to worry about, it’s their potential to blow a hole in the ozone layer and give us all skin cancer, plus make rabbits, sheep and salmon in South America go blind!
General anesthetics are administered to approximately 50 million patients each year in the United States. Anesthetic vapors and gases are also widely used in dentists' offices, veterinary clinics, and laboratories for animal research. All the volatile anesthetics that are currently used are halogenated compounds destructive to the ozone layer. These halogenated anesthetics could have potential significant impact on global warming. The widely used anesthetic gas nitrous oxide is a known greenhouse gas as well as an important ozone-depleting gas. These anesthetic gases and vapors are primarily eliminated through exhalation without being metabolized in the body, and most anesthesia systems transfer these gases as waste directly and unchanged into the atmosphere.
So, they are ozone depleting chemicals which are discharged directly into the atmosphere after being used in the operating theatre. This is confirmed here also:
In modern human anesthesia these compounds are evaporated into a stream of medical gases (oxygen, N2O, and medical breathing air). These breathing mixtures are administered to the patient through an airway device (e.g., laryngeal mask or tracheal tube) using an anesthetic machine, which is designed as semiclosed breathing system with an overflow and a return recycling stream that includes carbon dioxide (CO2) removal. The rates of in vivo metabolization are small, 0.2%, <0.02%, and 5%, for isoflurane, desflurane, and sevoflurane, respectively, and with ≈20% somewhat larger for halothane [Halpern, 1993; Sherman et al., 2012]. Because there are currently no mandatory or routine waste anesthetic gas capture systems, virtually all of the anesthetics used escape to the atmosphere. To protect personnel, these drugs are directly vented to the outside through the ventilation systems in modern operating theaters.
This is like not bothering to take your fridge to a recycling centre; taking it outside instead and cutting the refrigerant pipe so that all the CFCs or halogens hiss out into the atmosphere! I know all about it. During my misspent youth, at our first house, we dumped an old fridge freezer in the garden and my partner broke it up, unwittingly releasing all those nasty ozone destroying chemicals. We stood there guiltily listening as the refrigerant hissed out for what seemed like ages. I reckon we blew an inch wide hole in the Antarctic ozone layer that day! But that was a misspent youth. You would expect, would you not, that health authorities would act a bit more responsibly with their anaesthetics and capture and recycle them instead of venting them outside? Seems not. But the NHS are happy to ban these supposed planet destroying chemicals that they can’t be arsed to recycle.
But it gets worse. because, as it turns out, Desflurane is less of an ozone destroying chemical than other anaesthetic gases. So it’s OK to blow a hole in the ozone layer but it’s not OK to dangerously warm the planet. Effectively, that’s what the NHS is saying by deciding to ban Desflurane.
Chemically, halogenated volatile anesthetics are closely related to the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which play major roles in ozone depletion. The effect of a volatile anesthetic on ozone depletion will depend on its molecular weight, the number and type of halogen atoms, and its atmospheric lifetime12 (defined as the time taken to remove or transform 1/e, or 63%, of an emitted gas13). The atmospheric lifetime of these trace gases depends on their removal by chemical reaction with radicals, photolysis, and dry or wet deposition, such as “rainout.” Those species with a tropospheric () lifetime of more than 2 years are then believed to reach the stratosphere in significant quantities. The tropospheric lifetime of halogenated anesthetics is much shorter than that of CFCs (), because hydrogen atoms of the anesthetic molecules are susceptible to attack by hydroxyl radicals in the troposphere,2 making them less likely to reach the stratosphere. However, a concern has been raised about very short-lived compounds (with a lifetime of a few months or less) and their potentially significant contribution to ozone destruction.14 Once anesthetics reach the stratosphere, chlorine-containing anesthetics such as halothane, isoflurane, and enflurane may be more destructive to the ozone layer than are newer drugs, such as sevoflurane and desflurane, which are halogenated entirely with fluorine.
I am convinced these people are insane. I imagine some woke NHS manager, taking time off from diversity training, noticed that the global warming potential of Desflurane was 2540 and said to themselves: “OMG, a Thermageddon chemical! We’re all going to die if we continue using this stuff. We must ban it now!”
Back in November I called the direction of travel this idiocy is heading in...
https://craigm350.files.wordpress.com/2023/03/screenshot_20230303_213602_twitter.jpg
Original link:
https://twitter.com/CraigM350/status/1587552622294142976?t=CY9Au6YPxAvvRlJUpZ7ocg&s=19
Is this part of the plan to make us suffer more?