8 ms·

Lightning Strikes Twice as Much over Shipping Lanes

115 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

jarl-ragnar 7y ago
Anyone with a knowledge of atmospheric physics would say this is obvious. You can even detect shipping lanes because of the impact of the aerosols generated by the shipping traffic on the cloud cover compared to the surrounding area.
- dTal 7y ago
  You keep your "atmospheric physics", Professor Science - the gods are angry with international shipping and as far as I'm concerned that's all there is to it.
  - Lycake 7y ago
    On a more serious note, I wonder what people thought about lightning in earlier ages. For one before the concept of "God" was a thing, and also what the first seriouse sciency ideas were.
    - pintxo 7y ago
      I find it very reasonable to assume that the concept of God came upon us because of lightning strikes (or any other inexplicable phenomenon for that matter). So this would be more a biblical thing, before there was nothing, and then there was light.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Well the process seems to go through a polytheistic "laws of nature" deity phase with some selection in all the Classical societies. Becoming a more abstract and indirected set of supreme being as society develops. Then progress to monotheism brings us to some supremely powerful "reflection of us". Oh the conceit. :) On the thunder gods, Thor is most well known, but good grief look at the length of the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thunder_gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thunder_gods The polytheistic phase is a fascinating rabbit hole to descend, and then compare on contrast Ancient Egyptian with Greek, or Roman with Viking etc.
      - bobthechef 7y ago
        There's a stark difference between pagan gods and what Jews and Christians call God. In the former, we are dealing with beings among many within the created order of things. Often these gods would have some association with natural forces or things which would then become personified ("Mother Earth" is experiencing a little bit of a "revival" these days, beyond mere metaphor). The God of the Jews and the Christians is not a being among many but Being itself. That is, He is the cause by which all things and thus precedes things. So there's a sharp distinction between creation and Creator. You might even say that God is the verb "is". You can see this in Exodus 3:14 when God reveals himself to Moses as "I am" or "I am He who is", but you can attain the same conclusion through metaphysics.
        NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        A level of indirection was added to move from gods of nature, through gods within nature, to a monotheistic level of indirection further. That they are the creator or creation (usually). Judaism and Christianity aren't something apart, that move to "a creator" seems to be a tendency of monotheism. They are no more or less convincing than any of the rest of the monotheisms - or pastafarianism come to that. They are just the story that arose in a particular society tied to region and/or time, then belief spread wider, particularly if there was inclusion of evangelism. Or holy wars. Pastafarianism is the interesting one. It's clearly parody, yet it's equally clearly holding up a set of beliefs that are difficult to argue against - be nice to each other, don't kill people and so forth. The efforts to have it recognised as a "real" religion are interesting as on most counts it's as real as any of the rest. Despite it being humour, it's equally clear it's a nicely formed object to fit the monotheism pattern perfectly. Perhaps not surprising that some people are now claiming to "believe in it" wholeheartedly, even whilst knowing it's comedy. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/documentary-follows-pastafarians-strain-for-recognition https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/documentary-fo...
    - throwaway_law 7y ago
      >I wonder what people thought about lightning in earlier ages. Before humans could "make" fire, they were dependent on fires occurring naturally, lightning would have been the main source. I'm assuming they simply focused on the practical aspect, lightning = fire. Observing lightning can make fire may be considered sciency in some respects, fire radiating heat and keeping you warm may be considered sciency...even today we theorize cooked food was the catalyst for the evolution of modern human brains (that's kind of sciency, but not sure is early hominids would have been able to make the connection, surely they would have noticed cooked food is easier to chew, digest and even seems to provide more energy than uncooked food which is also kind of sciency).
    - MS90 7y ago
      On a related note, I always wondered what the first person to witness a volcanic eruption thought. Like a Mt. St. Helens level explosion, or something like the "Hooooooly smokin' Toledo" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFTFdZ_I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFTFdZ_I0
- aeroman 7y ago
  I would argue that it is not obvious. The impact of ships on low level liquid clouds is a very different process and is comparatively well understood. There is even a wikipedia article on it [1] However, convective invigoration by aerosols is a different issue. They are suggestions that suppressing warm rain (rain formed through processes that don't involving ice) might lead to more intense updraughts in convective systems [2], but the observational evidence is unclear. Convective storms tend to form in humid locations, where satellite observations of aerosol are biased high by the humidity [3]. Even in this case, it is not clear that the result holds outside the local aerosol enhancement generated by ships [4]. Do aerosols affect convective clouds at a large scale? I would argue that there is no strong evidence either way at the moment. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_tracks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_tracks [2] - http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160606 http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160606 [3] - http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL059524 http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL059524 [4] - http://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078682 http://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078682
  - jarl-ragnar 7y ago
    Try this "Mechanisms of lightning formation in deep maritime clouds and hurricanes" [1] It suggests "that the formation of lightning in maritime clouds requires two conditions to be satisfied: a) significant vertical velocities and a large cloud-depth, and b) the existence of small aerosols with the radii lower than about 0.05 μ m in diameter in the cloud condensational nuclei (CCN) size spectra." The pollution from the ships in the form of sulphate will likely provide such small aerosols so then you just need to significant vertical velocities. [1] - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=14&ved=2ahUKEwjqs6bLrZTlAhUIURUIHfnFCHoQFjANegQIChAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fams.confex.com%2Fams%2Fpdfpapers%2F167757.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1RsyMiCcpnQo0fskCeZ35P https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Anyone with a knowledge of atmospheric physics might think that it is plausible, but science is not confused over the difference between 'plausible', 'obvious' and 'true', and insists on evidence.
avar 7y ago
I really wish HN had some policy/method of changing the links to such pop-sci articles to the actual source. The paper they're talking about is much more readable. These news articles manage to spread all the information in the concise abstract over multiple pages without adding anything of value. Here's the paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL074982%4010.1002/%28ISSN%291944-8007.GRLHIGHLIGHTS2017 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
- Lycake 7y ago
  Thank you! The Abstract and especially the "Plain Language Summary" are written great. Sometimes even abstracts can be hard to understand if you are not experienced in the field, and I appreciate news sources summarizing those papers in more layman language, but in this case the article just makes it worse.
  - wastedhours 7y ago
    I do like the "Plain Language Summary", but as a non-scientist (but hopefully reasonably smart person), there's still some jargon in there that's confusing (had no idea what "graupel" was, nor "microphysics of cloud drop formation"). Credit to them for including something like that and definitely needs to be done more from the primary source, but think it needs a bit more work to be properly "plain language".
    - Lycake 7y ago
      > had no idea what "graupel" was funny. Here in Germany, "Graupel" is commonly used in normal weather reports. I didn't even know the word existed like that in english and didn't realize it when I read the paper. It's weird that you don't really notice words of your native language in a foreign language text. Or at least I rarely do. Same with the (originally German) words "Doppelgänger" and "Kindergarten".
      - wastedhours 7y ago
        Interesting, I tend to find the opposite - I outweightedly find the English words (or at least, the English versions of words probably derived from another language...) in text more often. Probably because my additional language skills are really bad. Feel like, "oh, I definitely know that word!"
rmetzler 7y ago
Regarding the legislation for ships to decrease air pollution - here is an article from two weeks ago describing cheat devices for ships to remove pollution from the air and dump it into the sea instead. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment-a9123181.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shipping-pollution...
- bkor 7y ago
  Wired also explained that before. In the article of this post they linked to an older article (https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-holidays/ https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-hol...). It goes into detail about the scrubbers. Open, closed and hybrid systems. Anything other than a closed system is bad. A closed system itself might or might not be bad (depends on what's done with the waste). Note that apparently the most common sulphur amount in fuel is around 2.7% (https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-resources/imo-sulphur-cap-and-mgo-hfo https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-...). Currently there's not too much available fuel at 0.50%. What I heard is planned is that they're going to mix the 2.7% and 0.1% sulphur fuel to get to 0.5%. Going from 2.7% to 0.5% sulphur fuel is apparently an additional cost of 15 billion USD/year. In my opinion once they're at 0.5% new legislation (by the IMO; an organization which basically sets these rules) should be introduced that reduces it further. Often in shipping the actual implementation date is 3-5 years, sometimes 10 years into the future. So new legislation should be introduced to reduce things further. Secondly, companies can get a significant competitive advantage by not following these rules. As such, countries should be strictly checking if ships and shipping lines are following this. Unlike other industries it's pretty common that a captain is jailed if certain rules aren't followed.
  - fludlight 7y ago
    Captains of large merchant vessels are salaried or even quasi-gig employees. Indirect operational control is based at the company hq, which is generally in a different country than the port. This leads hq to order their captains to do unsafe or illegal things to maximize short term profit. I recall an article on hn about a captain who was fired for sailing around a tropical storm instead of straight through it, costing the company a few extra days. Rules targeting captains (essentially disposable middle management) will be ineffective for this reason. They should instead target the ship itself (capital asset).
happycube 7y ago
... would a ship carrying trailers get hit by tornados twice as much, too?
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Hold on a minute! This seems to contradict the often-repeated assertion here on HN that shipping doesn't contribute to air pollution. Despite burning the dirtiest fuels possible and producing more pollution than all of automotive transportation, the smoke was supposed to somehow settle out and not get into the upper atmosphere. This article claims there're 2X lightening strikes over shipping lanes, because of additional particulates in the upper atmosphere. How do we reconcile this?
- Doxin 7y ago
  > This seems to contradict the often-repeated assertion here on HN that shipping doesn't contribute to air pollution. That assertion seems ridiculous on the face of it. Even if the particles settle you're still polluting the ocean. Besides aren't gasses the main pollution problem anyways? People confuse me sometimes...
  - gojomo 7y ago
    Gases are plenty bad, long-term & for the overall climate. But I'm pretty sure the particulates are even worse, in terms of causing both immediate discomfort & diagnosable illnesses in the short- and medium- terms.
    - Doxin 7y ago
      Sure, but that doesn't really affect the silliness of the assertion that shipping doesn't contribute at all.
- gojomo 7y ago
  The Wired article itself mentions that the particles in question settle within a few weeks. To the extent that's mostly over the ocean, that could be consistent with claims that shipping particulate pollution has a minimal effect on the health of land-based humans.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Aardwolf 7y ago
Interesting but kinda logical since the ship is a metal highest point in an ocean of flatness
kazinator 7y ago
> This may sound crazy—until you know a little bit about lightning. s/a little bit/what every third grader knows/
papreclip 7y ago
That's nice, something for the sailors to look at :)
fnord77 7y ago
before I read the article I was going to guess diesel particulates from the ships spewing those.

115 points by headalgorithm 7y ago

Anyone with a knowledge of atmospheric physics would say this is obvious. You can even detect shipping lanes because of the impact of the aerosols generated by the shipping traffic on the cloud cover compared to the surrounding area.

dTal 7y ago
You keep your "atmospheric physics", Professor Science - the gods are angry with international shipping and as far as I'm concerned that's all there is to it.
- Lycake 7y ago
  On a more serious note, I wonder what people thought about lightning in earlier ages. For one before the concept of "God" was a thing, and also what the first seriouse sciency ideas were.
  - pintxo 7y ago
    I find it very reasonable to assume that the concept of God came upon us because of lightning strikes (or any other inexplicable phenomenon for that matter). So this would be more a biblical thing, before there was nothing, and then there was light.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Well the process seems to go through a polytheistic "laws of nature" deity phase with some selection in all the Classical societies. Becoming a more abstract and indirected set of supreme being as society develops. Then progress to monotheism brings us to some supremely powerful "reflection of us". Oh the conceit. :) On the thunder gods, Thor is most well known, but good grief look at the length of the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thunder_gods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thunder_gods The polytheistic phase is a fascinating rabbit hole to descend, and then compare on contrast Ancient Egyptian with Greek, or Roman with Viking etc.
    - bobthechef 7y ago
      There's a stark difference between pagan gods and what Jews and Christians call God. In the former, we are dealing with beings among many within the created order of things. Often these gods would have some association with natural forces or things which would then become personified ("Mother Earth" is experiencing a little bit of a "revival" these days, beyond mere metaphor). The God of the Jews and the Christians is not a being among many but Being itself. That is, He is the cause by which all things and thus precedes things. So there's a sharp distinction between creation and Creator. You might even say that God is the verb "is". You can see this in Exodus 3:14 when God reveals himself to Moses as "I am" or "I am He who is", but you can attain the same conclusion through metaphysics.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        A level of indirection was added to move from gods of nature, through gods within nature, to a monotheistic level of indirection further. That they are the creator or creation (usually). Judaism and Christianity aren't something apart, that move to "a creator" seems to be a tendency of monotheism. They are no more or less convincing than any of the rest of the monotheisms - or pastafarianism come to that. They are just the story that arose in a particular society tied to region and/or time, then belief spread wider, particularly if there was inclusion of evangelism. Or holy wars. Pastafarianism is the interesting one. It's clearly parody, yet it's equally clearly holding up a set of beliefs that are difficult to argue against - be nice to each other, don't kill people and so forth. The efforts to have it recognised as a "real" religion are interesting as on most counts it's as real as any of the rest. Despite it being humour, it's equally clear it's a nicely formed object to fit the monotheism pattern perfectly. Perhaps not surprising that some people are now claiming to "believe in it" wholeheartedly, even whilst knowing it's comedy. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/documentary-follows-pastafarians-strain-for-recognition https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/documentary-fo...
  - throwaway_law 7y ago
    >I wonder what people thought about lightning in earlier ages. Before humans could "make" fire, they were dependent on fires occurring naturally, lightning would have been the main source. I'm assuming they simply focused on the practical aspect, lightning = fire. Observing lightning can make fire may be considered sciency in some respects, fire radiating heat and keeping you warm may be considered sciency...even today we theorize cooked food was the catalyst for the evolution of modern human brains (that's kind of sciency, but not sure is early hominids would have been able to make the connection, surely they would have noticed cooked food is easier to chew, digest and even seems to provide more energy than uncooked food which is also kind of sciency).
  - MS90 7y ago
    On a related note, I always wondered what the first person to witness a volcanic eruption thought. Like a Mt. St. Helens level explosion, or something like the "Hooooooly smokin' Toledo" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFTFdZ_I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLkFTFdZ_I0
aeroman 7y ago
I would argue that it is not obvious. The impact of ships on low level liquid clouds is a very different process and is comparatively well understood. There is even a wikipedia article on it [1] However, convective invigoration by aerosols is a different issue. They are suggestions that suppressing warm rain (rain formed through processes that don't involving ice) might lead to more intense updraughts in convective systems [2], but the observational evidence is unclear. Convective storms tend to form in humid locations, where satellite observations of aerosol are biased high by the humidity [3]. Even in this case, it is not clear that the result holds outside the local aerosol enhancement generated by ships [4]. Do aerosols affect convective clouds at a large scale? I would argue that there is no strong evidence either way at the moment. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_tracks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_tracks [2] - http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160606 http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1160606 [3] - http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL059524 http://doi.org/10.1002/2014GL059524 [4] - http://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078682 http://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL078682
- jarl-ragnar 7y ago
  Try this "Mechanisms of lightning formation in deep maritime clouds and hurricanes" [1] It suggests "that the formation of lightning in maritime clouds requires two conditions to be satisfied: a) significant vertical velocities and a large cloud-depth, and b) the existence of small aerosols with the radii lower than about 0.05 μ m in diameter in the cloud condensational nuclei (CCN) size spectra." The pollution from the ships in the form of sulphate will likely provide such small aerosols so then you just need to significant vertical velocities. [1] - https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=14&ved=2ahUKEwjqs6bLrZTlAhUIURUIHfnFCHoQFjANegQIChAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fams.confex.com%2Fams%2Fpdfpapers%2F167757.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1RsyMiCcpnQo0fskCeZ35P https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
mannykannot 7y ago
Anyone with a knowledge of atmospheric physics might think that it is plausible, but science is not confused over the difference between 'plausible', 'obvious' and 'true', and insists on evidence.

avar 7y ago

I really wish HN had some policy/method of changing the links to such pop-sci articles to the actual source. The paper they're talking about is much more readable. These news articles manage to spread all the information in the concise abstract over multiple pages without adding anything of value. Here's the paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL074982%4010.1002/%28ISSN%291944-8007.GRLHIGHLIGHTS2017 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

Lycake 7y ago
Thank you! The Abstract and especially the "Plain Language Summary" are written great. Sometimes even abstracts can be hard to understand if you are not experienced in the field, and I appreciate news sources summarizing those papers in more layman language, but in this case the article just makes it worse.
- wastedhours 7y ago
  I do like the "Plain Language Summary", but as a non-scientist (but hopefully reasonably smart person), there's still some jargon in there that's confusing (had no idea what "graupel" was, nor "microphysics of cloud drop formation"). Credit to them for including something like that and definitely needs to be done more from the primary source, but think it needs a bit more work to be properly "plain language".
  - Lycake 7y ago
    > had no idea what "graupel" was funny. Here in Germany, "Graupel" is commonly used in normal weather reports. I didn't even know the word existed like that in english and didn't realize it when I read the paper. It's weird that you don't really notice words of your native language in a foreign language text. Or at least I rarely do. Same with the (originally German) words "Doppelgänger" and "Kindergarten".
    - wastedhours 7y ago
      Interesting, I tend to find the opposite - I outweightedly find the English words (or at least, the English versions of words probably derived from another language...) in text more often. Probably because my additional language skills are really bad. Feel like, "oh, I definitely know that word!"

rmetzler 7y ago

Regarding the legislation for ships to decrease air pollution - here is an article from two weeks ago describing cheat devices for ships to remove pollution from the air and dump it into the sea instead. https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment-a9123181.html https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shipping-pollution...

bkor 7y ago
Wired also explained that before. In the article of this post they linked to an older article (https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-holidays/ https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-hol...). It goes into detail about the scrubbers. Open, closed and hybrid systems. Anything other than a closed system is bad. A closed system itself might or might not be bad (depends on what's done with the waste). Note that apparently the most common sulphur amount in fuel is around 2.7% (https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-resources/imo-sulphur-cap-and-mgo-hfo https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-...). Currently there's not too much available fuel at 0.50%. What I heard is planned is that they're going to mix the 2.7% and 0.1% sulphur fuel to get to 0.5%. Going from 2.7% to 0.5% sulphur fuel is apparently an additional cost of 15 billion USD/year. In my opinion once they're at 0.5% new legislation (by the IMO; an organization which basically sets these rules) should be introduced that reduces it further. Often in shipping the actual implementation date is 3-5 years, sometimes 10 years into the future. So new legislation should be introduced to reduce things further. Secondly, companies can get a significant competitive advantage by not following these rules. As such, countries should be strictly checking if ships and shipping lines are following this. Unlike other industries it's pretty common that a captain is jailed if certain rules aren't followed.
- fludlight 7y ago
  Captains of large merchant vessels are salaried or even quasi-gig employees. Indirect operational control is based at the company hq, which is generally in a different country than the port. This leads hq to order their captains to do unsafe or illegal things to maximize short term profit. I recall an article on hn about a captain who was fired for sailing around a tropical storm instead of straight through it, costing the company a few extra days. Rules targeting captains (essentially disposable middle management) will be ineffective for this reason. They should instead target the ship itself (capital asset).

happycube 7y ago

... would a ship carrying trailers get hit by tornados twice as much, too?

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Hold on a minute! This seems to contradict the often-repeated assertion here on HN that shipping doesn't contribute to air pollution. Despite burning the dirtiest fuels possible and producing more pollution than all of automotive transportation, the smoke was supposed to somehow settle out and not get into the upper atmosphere. This article claims there're 2X lightening strikes over shipping lanes, because of additional particulates in the upper atmosphere. How do we reconcile this?

Doxin 7y ago
> This seems to contradict the often-repeated assertion here on HN that shipping doesn't contribute to air pollution. That assertion seems ridiculous on the face of it. Even if the particles settle you're still polluting the ocean. Besides aren't gasses the main pollution problem anyways? People confuse me sometimes...
- gojomo 7y ago
  Gases are plenty bad, long-term & for the overall climate. But I'm pretty sure the particulates are even worse, in terms of causing both immediate discomfort & diagnosable illnesses in the short- and medium- terms.
  - Doxin 7y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't really affect the silliness of the assertion that shipping doesn't contribute at all.
gojomo 7y ago
The Wired article itself mentions that the particles in question settle within a few weeks. To the extent that's mostly over the ocean, that could be consistent with claims that shipping particulate pollution has a minimal effect on the health of land-based humans.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Aardwolf 7y ago

Interesting but kinda logical since the ship is a metal highest point in an ocean of flatness

kazinator 7y ago

> This may sound crazy—until you know a little bit about lightning. s/a little bit/what every third grader knows/

papreclip 7y ago

That's nice, something for the sailors to look at :)

fnord77 7y ago

before I read the article I was going to guess diesel particulates from the ships spewing those.