Since the first public use of anesthesia, on 16 October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital, advances in pharmacology have given anesthesiologists an ever-widening array of chemical tools. The most recent of these are fluorinated ethers, so-called F-gases, a prominent example being desflurane (C3H2F6O). Among its other properties, desflurane is a powerful greenhouse gas. If scored by its twenty-year Global Warming Potential, GWP-20, it is 7020 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. As a result of this fact alone, it has been banned from use in the UK National Health Service, and as of 2026 will be strongly discouraged from use in the European Union. Although the Global Warming Potential is widely cited in non-specialist literature (including the anesthesiology literature), in policy circles, and in the mass media, it is viewed with skepticism in the climate science community. According to Article 2 of the Paris Agreement, the internationally accepted standard for the measure of climate change is “the increase in the global average temperature.”
We assess the climate hazard attending the use of desflurane by computing the effect of its use, at scale, on global average temperature and compare it to its GWP-derived “CO2-equivalent.” Because carbon dioxide has an atmospheric lifetime of tens of thousands of years, its emissions linger in the atmosphere contributing to long-term warming. In contrast, desflurane has an atmospheric lifetime of fourteen years. Even if desflurane were used indefinitely in 300 million surgical procedures per year (the current worldwide annual total) its effect on global average temperature would never exceed 0.002°C, much smaller than the natural variation of temperature due to variations of solar insolation.
We conclude GWP is a misleading metric when quantifying the climate effects of short-lived climate pollutants such as desflurane. Calculations of global average temperature, as per the Paris Agreement, is a far superior method of weighing the influence of greenhouse gases on climate.
IMAP Senior Fellow Robert Kleinberg will present. Register here: Monthly Lunch Seminars | Impact Measurement & Allocation Program
See this: Should Modern Surgical Anesthetics with Enormous Global Warming Potentials be Banned in Canada? May 2025, Canada Methane Conference poster.
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