What is Global Warming Potential?

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Omkar Khanna asked 5 years ago

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What is Global Warming Potential?

Article Name

What is Global Warming Potential?

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Global warming potential helps understand and evaluate the impact of greenhouse gases towards global warming and climate change.

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Team GreenSutra

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GreenSutra

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Question Tags: actonclimate, climatechange, climatecrisis, environment, globalwarming, globalwarmingpotential, greenhouseeffect, greenhousegases, greensutra, pollution

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Team GreenSutra® Staff answered 5 years ago

All the greenhouse gases differ from each other in three key aspects:

Radiative Efficiency (Ability to absorb energy)
At what wavelength does the gas absorb radiation
Lifetime (Duration of stay in atmosphere)

In order to allow for comparisons among these greenhouse gases a standard was developed. This standard is also referred to as the Global Warming Potential.

IPCC 1996 defines the global warming potential as the cumulative radiative forcing – both direct and indirect effects -integrated over a period of time from the emission of a unit mass of gas relative to some reference gas.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) was chosen by IPCC as this reference greenhouse gas since it is a naturally occurring gas and plays an important role in the carbon cycle. The GWP of Carbon Dioxide is considered to be 1.

Global Warming Potential specifically refers to a measure of how much energy the emission of 1 ton of gas will absorb over a given period of time, relative to the emissions of 1 ton of carbon dioxide (CO₂).