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Comment by totetsu | Hacker News Reader

I heard CO2 is a gas with a powerful green house effect. What happens at the end of life of these units I wonder? What if they leak and it gets into the atmosphere!

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So, in the US, for instance, the average person leads to the emission of 16 tonnes of co2 per year. The amount of co2 in your domestic heat pump (which… doesn’t weigh multiple tonnes) is more or less immaterial, even if it does leak.

> I heard CO2 is a gas with a powerful green house effect.

Compared to other refrigerants it's a paradise:

* https://www.epa.gov/hfcs/technology-transitions-gwp-referenc...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Calcu...

CO2 has a surprisingly feeble greenhouse effect.

Almost anything else you could use as a refrigerant is worse.

Even water vapour is a worse greenhouse gas.

Edit: wait, have I been whooshed? Apologies if so... ;-)

Maybe but at this point I no longer think it's fair to be quite this dry on something that quite so many people would be legitimately sincere about anyway so I wouldn't exactly apologize for being the victim.

> Maybe but at this point I no longer think it's fair to be quite this dry on something that quite so many people would be legitimately sincere about

Yeah, but I'm from the UK so I should be able to detect dry humour. It's something that Americans don't really get.

You know, like affordable healthcare.

I apologise, I am at the dry humour stage of climate grief.

Take heart in the thought that this is going to ease off a bit in a couple of years when the current solar cycle dies down and the sun is not dumping about 5% more energy into the atmosphere than normal.

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