According to a University of Toronto news release, scientists have found a new chemical hiding in the atmosphere that resembles a long-lived greenhouse gas (LLGHG). The kicker? This newly found greenhouse gas is 7,000 times more powerful than CO2. Scientists from the University of Toronto’s Department of Chemistry contend that perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) is the most radiatively effective chemical discovered to date, tossing all other chemical records aside due to its ability to influence climate.

Radiative efficiency details how effectively a molecule can impact climate. This value is then increased by its atmospheric concentration to identify the total climate influence.

According to the news release, PFTBA has been in use since the mid-20th century for different applications in electrical equipment and is currently utilized in thermally and chemically stable liquids prepared for utilization in electronic testing and as heat transfer agents. The chemical is generated by humans and there are no known techniques that would dispatch or remove PFTBA in the lower atmosphere so it has an extremely long lifetime, maybe hundreds of years, and is dispatched in the upper atmosphere.

“Global warming potential is a metric used to compare the cumulative effects of different greenhouse gases on climate over a specified time period,” noted Cora Young, a member of the University of Toronto team.

Time is taken into consideration in the global warming potential metric as various compounds remain in the atmosphere for various lengths of time, which decides how long-lasting the climate effects are.

CO2 is utilized as the baseline for comparison since it is the most significant greenhouse gas responsible for human-caused climate change.

“PFTBA is extremely long-lived in the atmosphere and it has a very high radiative efficiency; the result of this is a very high global warming potential. Calculated over a 100-year timeframe, a single molecule of PFTBA has the equivalent climate impact as 7100 molecules of CO2,” posited Angela Hong, another member of the University of Toronto team.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.