
Lightning Strikes Twice as Much over Shipping Lanes - headalgorithm
https://www.wired.com/story/why-lightning-strikes-twice-as-much-over-shipping-lanes/
======
avar
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/10.1002/201...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2017GL074982%4010.1002/%28ISSN%291944-8007.GRLHIGHLIGHTS2017)

~~~
bitcurious
The reason this article was written was because Wired paid a journalist to
peruse a bunch of academic journals looking for interesting stuff. If you cut
Wired out from the profit loop, you’d have to read those academic journals
yourself, or depend on other users on this website to do it. I don’t see
either happening reliably enough to compete with a paid professional.

~~~
basch
It's really time for hn to acknowledge that stories have multiple links,
perspectives, and chronological events and allow groupings. Take techmeme for
example
[https://www.techmeme.com/191010/p17#a191010p17](https://www.techmeme.com/191010/p17#a191010p17)

To the left of the story, click the down arrow, thats every repost or
perspective of the original story. Then the indented stories are followups.

Circa also designed itself around this, having a story and when you clicked
it, THEN you would see the overall structure of the stories development
timeline.

It wouldnt even have to be a chance to the existing hn site, somuch as an
additional view that allows stories and comments to be stitched together and
intermixed.

More on the topic of this post, I love the wired headline, how it reads
"lightening strikes twice" and then the sentence continues, modifying twice
into "twice as."

~~~
fedups
Never heard about Circa before, but just read a little about them and their
feature that has the goal

> "to break down a story into its core elements: facts, stats, quotes and
> media", as opposed to a summary where content is reduced for quicker reading
> or users are linked elsewhere for the full story

Do you know of any other [general, not tech-specific] media outlets with this
philosophy? I find most sources these days are unhelpful even though they
think they're adding value with emphasis on narratives.

~~~
basch
it flies in the face of "chronological feed culture" (twitter, rivers) and
"algo popularity" to have people clicking the same story multiple time for
updates. chron/ai feeds are meant to let you ever feast on the new without
ever going back to the old. that philosophy you are looking for has a hard
time competing with out of context constantly breaking news blips. (short
answer to your q, I cant think of a good one off the top of my head.) Does
wikinews have that sort of metastructure above stories?
[https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page)

personally id love a menu in a news app that says "updates to stories youve
clicked" without having to follow a story. then separately i would have
"followed/starred" stories as a different menu entry. they might sort
differently, such as, since last clicked vs since most recent update.

------
JoeAltmaier
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?

~~~
tlb
> often-repeated assertion here on HN that shipping doesn't contribute to air
> pollution

Could you provide a citation?

~~~
Symmetry
Seriously. You can be talking about air pollution as CO2 or particulate or
sulfur dioxide or a number of other things and which sort of pollution you're
talking about makes a big difference in how polluting you should consider
container ships to be. Also whether you're comparing tanker ships to other
forms of freight or to overall pollution emissions or to the hunter gatherer
lifestyle.

------
jarl-ragnar
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.

~~~
aeroman
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
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&c...](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)

------
rmetzler
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...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shipping-pollution-
sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment-a9123181.html)

~~~
bkor
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-
hol...](https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-holidays/)).
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-...](https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-
resources/imo-sulphur-cap-and-mgo-hfo)). 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
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).

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

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

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fnord77
before I read the article I was going to guess diesel particulates from the
ships spewing those.

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

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

