First they came for your cars, then your gas boilers, travel, food and farms. Now the Net Zero nutters, using their preposterous and invented climate emergency scare, have medicines, anaesthetics and painkillers in their crosshairs. Moves are afoot to reduce the use of popular, cheap, safe and effective nitrous oxide in the UK and replace it with substitutes such as methoxyflurane, a gas long banned in the United States following concerns about kidney and liver damage. Of course any science that disputes climate Armageddon is of little intertest to political activists, but the rest of us might be interested to note recent findings that found any ‘global warming’ caused by gases used by anaesthetists was “negligible and cannot be measured or felt”.
Nitrous oxide, sometimes known as laughing gas, is in common use in dentistry and maternity wards. It is carried on ambulances and is considered a very safe and effective analgesic medicine. But the UK National Health Service (NHS) has made a very silly pledge to be carbon Net Zero by 2040. According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), the use of anaesthetics, which also include isoflurane, desflurane and sevoflurane, has been identified as a “carbon hotspot“. The NHS Long Term Plan is said to highlight these gases “as an area for action” and the RCEM says consideration should be given to the use of alternatives “where feasible and safe to do so”. The Royal College of Anaesthetists recently reported that many practitioners had moved away from routine nitrous oxide use in general anaesthesia, including in previous “high-usage” areas.
Methoxyflurane is marketed under the brand name Penthrox and has had a chequered medical past. Common in hospitals from the 1960s, it fell out of favour after the concerns about kidney and liver damage were raised. A number of other worries mean that it is best used only on patients who are in reasonable health. It remains banned in the United States, but is available in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and the UK.
Pressure to use alternatives such as Penthrox is undoubtedly being applied across the NHS with the use of a ‘Global Warming Potential’ metric used to claim that anaesthetic gases are hundreds to thousands of times more warming than carbon dioxide. However, this metric is controversial even within the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a short recent paper titled ‘Emissions of Anaesthetic Causes Negligible Warming‘ and published by the CO2 Coalition, three scientists note the opinion of the IPCC that: “It must be stressed that there is no universally accepted methodology for combing all the relevant factors into a single global warming potential for greenhouse gas emissions.” The NHS tells patients that using nitrous oxide “significantly increases the environmental effect of your anaesthetic”, with every hour equivalent to driving a small car 106 km. Perhaps slightly more reassuring for a women giving birth or a patient undergoing root canal surgery is the view of the CO2 Coalition scientists that the global warming potential is a “nearly irrelevant parameter for assessing whether the warming from anaesthetic gases will be damaging or not”.
In the table below the scientists detail the temperature increases that might be expected from the heat-trapping influences caused by the most important medical gases. The authors note that any warming will be in the order of a hundredth of a degree centigrade – too small to feel or measure. Those interested in learning more about the physics and quantitative details of atmospheric warming are invited to read the discussion that is included in the paper.
Lest it be said that fears about the removal of common anaesthetic gases is a minority sceptical interest, a letter in the Guardian in 2021 will be of considerable interest. Dame Julia Slingo, former Met Office Chief Scientist, and Dr Mary Slingo, Senior Registrar in Anaesthetics at Southampton General Hospital, wrote that any impact of the gases’ tiny emissions and radiative forcing on the climate “will, quite frankly, be ‘lost in translation’”. The effect is “vanishingly small” and invoking climate change as a reason for abandoning their use “does not hold up scientifically”.
Concerns about anaesthetic gases are of course just another one of the never-ending scares designed to enforce the Net Zero fantasy. Removing all hydrocarbons from an industrial society means reducing living conditions to a brutal primitivism. Try the removal of many medicines, try also little food or heat. Despite this, around 200 MPs expressed support for the recent Climate and Nature Bill that sought to outlaw 90% of all hydrocarbon use in the United Kingdom within a decade. A four-hour long clown show featuring almost every debunked climate scare imaginable tried to force the bill to an important second reading, advancing a law that would, if implemented, have led to the almost certain collapse of British society. Thankfully this appalling bill, supported by all 72 Lib Dems and 80 Labour MPs, failed to pass.
When it comes to making unsubstantiated claims to harm human health, it appears that laughing gas and hot air remain in plentiful supply.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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If we are going to ignore ‘vanishingly small’ contributions to climate change, the UK is completely off the hook. Turn up the central heating! (I wouldn’t go out of my way to a shop that was advertising a 0.8% sale).
We in this country have forced ourselves in law to reduce emissions of CO2. If we do not reduce them we are breaking the law and can actually be sued. How insane is this? Who in their right mind does something as irresponsible and damaging as this to its own people? The Net Zero Amendment was waved through parliament with not a single question asked. No debate and no vote. It was simply a Climate Coup. The entire Political Class of hand wringing parasites taking their instructions from the UN and WEF who in turn are controlled by the Central Banks are in control and we have no say in it. The 120 Trillion Dollar Decarbonisation Scam is set to make billions for Bankers who control the money supply and Politicians have no choice but to do their bidding —–New World Order SCAM
entire Political Class of hand wringing parasites
Beautifully said.
Net zero was written in to law after lobbying from NGOs who are funded by the government, then the government gets sued by these same NGOs using tax payers money. The whole thing is government policy, dreamed up in Davos. The Rockefellers alone have set up around 1000 of these climate change NGOs. The World’s elites are the people in change.
“breaking the law”
I suggest politicians grow a pair and where international law is concerned tell the law makers to F. right off.
Fine us? No can do, we’re broke.
Plus they want to ban my Ventolin inhaler. They are nuts.
See my comment about this. Here’s a link to the pros and cons of inhaler types.
https://use-inhalers.com/comparative-studies-on-mdi-and-dpi
It would appear that Aerosol or MDI types are cheaper, last longer in use and are more reliable. The Dry powder inhalers or DPI types have a short in use shelf life, mine is 30 days. They are more difficult to use, can be easily contaminated and are a nuisance.
DPI types are typically more expensive. Ironically the mainstay of reliever inhalers is Ventolin, which is MDI aerosol and as I mentioned the patent appears to expire in 2028. Coincident!
Green lunacy writ large. Like good Malthusians, Planet Savers of course think there are too many of us, so noble Planet Savers are unlikely to be personally troubled by experiencing or witnessing the pain of childbirth. Let those deviant birthing mothers suffer without recourse to that evil laughing gas and air.
On a point of information, my understanding is that nitrous oxide is no longer an anaesthetic of choice for dentistry, being superseded by safer intravenous anaesthetics:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6953638/pdf/main.pdf
“Deaths associated with GA for dentistry 1948 – 2016: the evolution of a policy for general anaesthesia (GA) for dental treatment.”
Where intavenous anaesthesia is contra-indicated, the gaseous anaesthetic fluothane becomes the agent of choice – another no, no for Planet Savers intent on conserving the Holy Ozone Layer. The civilised world has been here before…
https://youtu.be/Z9amZ8McoBA?t=60
…Beware indeed, “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister by the lights of perverted (climate) science.”
The Global Gauleiters must not prevail. Resist!
Well, thanks to the covid vaccines, not many people will be giving birth anyway.
Perhaps it’s all part of a plan?
Water vapour is considered (by some) as the most important greenhouse gas. So by the same ignorant vilification as anaesthetic gasses we should stop boiling water for cups of tea or coffee?
Definitely. And oxygen is part of the fictitious ‘greenhouse effect’. Better ban that too.
Nitrous Oxide doesn’t include any carbon – are the Climate zealots now fingering Nitrogen and oxygen? Let’s just ban the whole atmosphere!
And all sensate life on earth is made up primarily of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorous.
Can’t be too cautious when Saving the Planet is at stake. Ban these deviant elements with immediate effect, which also gets rid of that troublemaker dihydrogen oxide. Rocks shall rule.
And Slabhead Starmerfuehrer will be their leader!
Despite 78% of the atmosphere is composed of nitrogen (about 4,290,000 billion metric tons) global warmists are convinced that humans cause harmful nitrogen pollution of it. As MTF, while he was still spreading his nonsense here, once stated (albeit worded in a less transparent way) about CO₂, the problem is that human-generated CO₂ is not natural CO₂. Obviously, human ’emitted’ nitrogen is not natural nitrogen either: It’s atoms with the wrong colour (or maybe the wrong haircut?) which are very toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects, to use one of the boilerplate warnings woketurds print on absolutely everything from shoe polish (only brand-name shoe polish, mind you, the shop own-brands are apparently not important enough) to vaping devices.
106 km = 66 miles
The environmental effect of your anaesthetic is about the same as driving a small car at an average 66 mph for the same duration.
Ban ambulances! /sarc
all complex molecules act as greenhouse gases and the more complex the molecule, the bigger the effect. This is because the covalent bonds are never still but bend, stretch and wobble up and down releasing energy by collision with neighbouring gas molecules. The more bonds there are, the more bending, stretching and wobbling goes on. Consequently, substituting a relatively simple molecule like NO2, containing three atoms, for a complex one like methoxyfluorane, containing a dozen, makes no sense whatsoever (but we’re used to that).
Yet another reason to disband the NHS.
I think it’s an EU regulation.
This is beyond silly.
The figures in table 1 are so laughingly small as to be meaningless.
Add to that this statement from the paragraph above the table ‘the temperature increases that might be’
Clearly yet another ’emperors new clothes’ fear story
In the EU they are now restricting the use of aerosol inhalers such as ventolin, it’s a very widely used bronchodilator for respiratory problems. They would normally supply enough for six months between checkups but now you only get one and have to request another if needed at a later date. I understand they want to phase them out in favour of powdered inhalers.
I did some checking and it looks like the patent for ventolin expires in 2028….
Everyday I wake up there is one more piece of disturbing news about the UK. In addition to all the bad news, look up. Your skies are full of thick grey clouds month after month. A clear sky is quickly covered in chem trails. And yet…..I do not know one Brit who believes in weather manipulation, Geoengineering, chem trails. Probably the same millions of people who gratefully took the most dangerous experimental biological (mRNA covid vaxxes). Geoengineering Watch.net
By “chem trails”, do you mean con trails from aircraft?
These climate scam members are all part of a racketeering operation. They should all be arrested and held responsible for the damages they are doing to society and people’s lives. This is only happening in rich western countries where tax money is readily available and people are complacent enough to allow it.
This fits nicely with the theory that the net zero scare is all part of a scheme to immiserate and ultimately reduce the population.