When it comes to heating the planet, the fluid in your AC is thousands of times worse than CO2

abcnews.go.com:

Air conditioning has made life in many hot places possible, but the special fluids that make it work are extremely hazardous to the climate

Air conditioning has made it possible to live comfortably in many hot places, but the special chemicals that makes it work are actually extremely hazardous to the climate.

Refrigerants used in fridges, freezers and cars change from a fluid to a gas to transport heat away from the place you want cooled.

In refrigerators, the refrigerant starts as a liquid and expands into a gas, which forces it to cool down. This chilled gas circulates through the fridge, absorbing heat as it flows along.

Once the chilled fluid has absorbed significant heat, say, from eggs you just hardboiled and placed inside, it gets squeezed in a compressor and gets even hotter. The refrigerant then flows through condenser coils where it releases its heat out and cools back into a liquid.

The cycle starts over when the refrigerant enters the expansion device, where the fluid spreads out, cools, and once again turns into a gas.

Air conditioners also use refrigerants and operate similarly to this, but they release their heat to the outdoors rather than your kitchen.

Refrigerants absorb a lot more heat than water or other common fluids, which makes them great for cooling systems but bad for climate change when they escape.

Some of the earlier refrigerant chemicals that allowed hot places like Phoenix, Arizona and Dubai to grow into population centers, were a family known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), but scientists discovered that these were causing widespread damage to the ozone layer in the mid to late 1900s.

So countries came together and ratified the Montreal Protocol which went into effect in 1987 and