How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world | Hacker News Reader

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

mailonsunday.co.uk

49 pointsjavery27 comments

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.

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."

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 view. “One giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars, study finds” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-p... and can we see your authoritative links showing that these ships are fine examples of excellent emission control with regard to toxic gases.

Best not to be bigoted and simply remain wary regarding all news items wherever they’re to be found. And no, I don't work for the Daily Mail.

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?

A lot of people use the daily mail as their primary source of news (I'm not sure what informed news means).

Hacker news is a site full of smart coder/developer types, but I think most of them are not UK based so won't know what an unpleasant paper the Daily Mail is.

In the United States emissions regulations recently came into effect (2007) that mandated ultra low sulfur diesel and particle filtration for vehicle exhaust systems. I wonder if the particle filtration technology could be applied to ships, and what the implications would be.

Also, the fuel being burned appears to be a byproduct of petroleum distillation, and while ships are burning it "because they can", I wonder what the other options are for disposing of it. Legislating away all of the consumers of a byproduct does not get rid of the byproduct. I would assume that the petroleum could be further distilled out of the byproduct, to some extent, but that at the end there would be some waste sludge that might be unmarketable. If that's the case, then THAT becomes a disposal headache, and I'd be curious to see how that plays out.

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?

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.

It is worth noting that just one cup of tea causes me to produce more urine than all the cars in the world.

(Just thought I would point out how "useful" comparisons like this are. Less useful than an entire Library of Congress...)

Except that this one, um, is.

They mention explicitly that tanker fuel has half the allowable maximum of sulpur on average, but it's still a travesty and can be cut down substantially if proper measures are applied.

It's unfortunate that environmental policy is dictated in terms of sensationalism rather than actual impact. Rational policy outlook should have certainly looked at shipping as one of the first causes of airborne pollution.

Rational policy outlook should have certainly looked at shipping as one of the first causes of airborne pollution.

Rational policy outlook should have started by looking at the adverse effects of airborne pollution. What are the adverse effects of releasing SO2 into the atmosphere over the middle of the ocean?

What and where matter just as much as how much.

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 subway has some of the most filthiest air you will ever experience. It has that tar sulphur smell to it.

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.

If one cup of tea made you produce as much urine as half of all the people on earth, then yes, we should grab you by the collar and confiscate your ungodly cup of tea.

Yes but that's not what the analogy jrockway used is pointing out. Cars put out plenty of pollutants, but that doesn't mean that car sized engines have the same problems with sulphur.

Basically its dishonest because it relies on people understanding cars as polluters - which they are, just not of sulphur - to imply that tankers are unbelievably polluting.

None of this means that I think sulphur emissions aren't a problem.

Now isn't the nicest time to be going after shipping companies, with the way their profits have collapsed over the last year. The recession has been pretty hard for airlines, but the drop in shipping prices is shocking by comparison: more than a 10x drop.

http://investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index.htm

In other words, now is the perfect time for them to put their ships in the docks and perform maintenance and upgrades without losing money from missed shipments.

Ships already beat (most?) other forms of transport on oil-per-tonnage-mile, why not fix the last few wrinkles that make them look bad?

This is already happening with smaller and more inefficient ships being scrapped. From one article: http://www.zawya.com/Story.cfm/sidZAWYA20091014053222

Seeing those graphs I just see things going to previous years stats. Am I not reading properly or are they just sad that infinite growth has once again shown not to exist?

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