We keep gassing on

With around a hundred different reports on the subject of environmental sustainability published every week, it can be difficult to keep abreast of all the latest news and discoveries and it can often feel like a science lesson as we wade through some of the terms.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the major greenhouse gas (or "GHG") in that, as Joseph Fourier discovered in the nineteenth century, it behaves a bit like a blanket for the Earth and keeps us warm.

There are other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide and, as found in the semiconductor industry, perfluorocarbons. Any gases that absorbs infrared radiation and convert it to heat are global warming gases and thus, are sometimes referred to collectively as CO2e, meaning "carbon dioxide equivalent" because of how they behave.

Taking the amount of time a greenhouse gas remains in our atmosphere into account, the global warming potential (or "GWP") of these gases can be referred to as a number, which is representative of the amount of radiation that is converted to heat by the gas - i.e its potency - over a period of a hundred years.

As carbon dioxide (CO2) is the biggest greenhouse gas contributor and is the gas that all other GHGs are compared against, it has a global warming potential of 1. While there are smaller amounts of other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, if we compare the molecules of other gases to carbon dioxide, they are more potent. For instance, methane has a GWP of 28, nitrous oxide approximately 300 and some of the perfluorocarbons run into thousands. So, while carbon dioxide is the main focus for reducing emissions, we do need to tackle all greenhouse gases to get to net zero.