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How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

mailonsunday.co.uk

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Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#21

Post by Andys »

diN0bot wrote: post #4

1. does anyone know the ratio of pollution from all-the-consumer-planes-in-the-world to all-the-cars-in-the-world? (i feel like military planes and tanks should be excluded, or rather included in a separate ratio for comparison.) 2. how does this pollution compare to oil spills (eg, Exxon's Valdez)?

I calculated it out once... it turns out that planes consume a very similar amount of fuel per kilometre of travel to a person driving a car.

However, the distances involved in flying around are much greater than most would attempt to drive.

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#22

Post by tome »

bumblebird wrote: post #20
bdfh42 wrote: post #10

I am aghast to log in to HN on a Sunday morning and find the "top topic" to be a post from the MailOnSunday site. This august institution of lies, half truths and mostly made up stuff is a British byword for scientific reporting - in every negative way possible. Without doing any fact checking or research of my own part (just bitter experience) I declare this "absolute tosh".

Dismissing things based purely on their source makes you pretty much as bad as they are. If there's real evidence that proves this story is false, it'd be cool to see it. I think it's in the spirit of HN to discuss content rather than source.

No it doesn't. People who read Hacker News (and people in general) simply don't have the time to perform an in depth verification of the truth of any story they might read here, so it makes sense to link only to reputable sources. The Mail is not one of them; people who are not from the UK might not realise this.

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#23

Post by bumblebird »

tome wrote: post #22
bumblebird wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissing things based purely on their source makes you pretty much as bad as they are. If there's real evidence that proves this story is false, it'd be cool to see it. I think it's in the spirit of HN to discuss content rather than source.

No it doesn't. People who read Hacker News (and people in general) simply don't have the time to perform an in depth verification of the truth of any story they might read here, so it makes sense to link only to reputable sources. The Mail is not one of them; people who are not from the UK might not realise this.

As noted elsewhere in the thread, find the same story from other sources if you prefer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-p...

"The calculations of ship and car pollution are based on the world's largest 85,790KW ships' diesel engines which operate about 280 days a year generating roughly 5,200 tonnes of SOx a year, compared with diesel and petrol cars which drive 15,000km a year and emit approximately 101gm of SO2/SoX a year."

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#24

Post by lutorm »

cperciva wrote: post #15
illumen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air moves. Pollution from one country /half way around the world/ can float to where you live. Most ships are closer than /halfway around the world/ to pieces of land as they travel from one side of the world to the other. Where do you think all of the sulphur and CO2(also mentioned in the article) goes? It doesn't float off into space. In London, I'd be way more worried about the air in the subway system. The London…

Air moves Yes, but it moves slowly. Where do you think all of the sulphur and CO2 goes? The lifetime of SO2 in the atmosphere is no more than a few days; before it can reach land, most of it is converted to (SO4)^{2-}. I agree with you where CO2 is concerned, because CO2 is not rapidly eliminated from the atmosphere -- but the article isn't talking about CO2.

Right. The SO2 goes into the ocean and makes them more acidic. The trouble is that CO2 is already doing the same thing, and we don't need oceans with lower pH.

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#25

Post by Retric »

vixen99 wrote: post #18
slance wrote: post #16

I can't believe that HN is linking to the Daily Mail... I can guarantee that everything said in this article is completely or partly untrue. It's part of the daily mail's online strategy I think, increase traffic by using overseas social media whose users may not be fully aware of how utterly horrible and untruthful the paper is.

You can't guarantee anything of the sort. Nobody with any sense uses the Daily Mail as a prime source of informed news because its role is entertainment mostly via hot gossip which people, though clearly not you, enjoy. Please list major news stories where the Mail as reported lies and include a comparison with the record of the broadsheets in the UK. As to this particular new item, the Guardian doesn't take your vie…

You can't take 50m modern cars with pollution control systems then say worldwide car pollution = ~#of cars in the world / that number. The worst cars running on the worst fuel create several times more pollution than a new modern car. And world wide there are a lot of old cars.

So, in this case yes, they are saying something that's wrong.

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#26

Post by cperciva »

lutorm wrote: post #24
cperciva wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air moves Yes, but it moves slowly. Where do you think all of the sulphur and CO2 goes? The lifetime of SO2 in the atmosphere is no more than a few days; before it can reach land, most of it is converted to (SO4)^{2-}. I agree with you where CO2 is concerned, because CO2 is not rapidly eliminated from the atmosphere -- but the article isn't talking about CO2.

Right. The SO2 goes into the ocean and makes them more acidic. The trouble is that CO2 is already doing the same thing, and we don't need oceans with lower pH.

The SO2 goes into the ocean and makes them more acidic.

Yep. But worldwide SO2 emissions are approximately 2.2 * 10^12 mol/year, which -- given the oceans' volume of approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometers -- would translate to an annual increase in ocean (SO4)^{2-} concentration of 0.0000000017 mol/L, even if every molecule of SO2 released into the atmosphere ended up in the oceans in the form of (SO4)^{2-}.

Given that seawater already contains approximately 0.028 mol/L of (SO4)^{2-}, I don't think this is a rate of increase which we particularly need to worry about.

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#27

Post by randallsquared »

Retric wrote: post #25
vixen99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't guarantee anything of the sort. Nobody with any sense uses the Daily Mail as a prime source of informed news because its role is entertainment mostly via hot gossip which people, though clearly not you, enjoy. Please list major news stories where the Mail as reported lies and include a comparison with the record of the broadsheets in the UK. As to this particular new item, the Guardian doesn't take your vie…

You can't take 50m modern cars with pollution control systems then say worldwide car pollution = ~#of cars in the world / that number. The worst cars running on the worst fuel create several times more pollution than a new modern car. And world wide there are a lot of old cars. So, in this case yes, they are saying something that's wrong.

You're complaining that they should have compared to only shiny new cars, rather than actually existing cars, because then the comparison would have fared better for the cars?

Re: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world

#28

Post by billswift »

lief79 wrote: post #8
diN0bot wrote: post #4

1. does anyone know the ratio of pollution from all-the-consumer-planes-in-the-world to all-the-cars-in-the-world? (i feel like military planes and tanks should be excluded, or rather included in a separate ratio for comparison.) 2. how does this pollution compare to oil spills (eg, Exxon's Valdez)?

The ratio is only referring to sulfur. I'm fairly sure the high octane required for jet fuel would prohibit most sulfur emissions. Additionally, the weight sensitivity would be an added incentive to reduce any unused components, such as sulfur.

Does octane rating even mean anything for jet fuels? Octane rating is related to knock in piston engines, is there a similar problem in jets? Jet fuel is basically kerosene, not gasoline. And even in piston engines, is there any relation between sulphur and knock?
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