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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