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.
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.
Five links, three back to their own site, two away from their site. But none of them link to the academic paper! This is totally unacceptable. Is this not the web, aren't hyperlinks the most basic tool we have when creating the web? Aren't hyperlinks what make the "web" a web in the first place? So why then do media organizations refuse to use them properly?
(Sometimes they have the excuse of "not wanting to send precious eyeballs to somebody else's site" which I don't think is an excuse that should be tolerated but isn't even relevant here since they did include two links that leave Wired.)
I don't think we should be rewarding this sort of gatekeeping behavior. This isn't a one time fluke. Refusing to link to source material even though it's available on the web is the status quo for scientific journalism in particular. It's gatekeeping, and shouldn't be accepted as the status quo.
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
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
I would really dislike it if somebody had the power to swap out links like that. The whole purpose of social voting sites is that we get to to decide what links we see as a community. Plenty of folks prefer casually summarized content, ads and all.
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.
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.
It doesn't contribute in that it burns the dirtiest fuels out in the middle of nowhere, both causing the effect to be much more diluted, and allowing cleaner fuel to be used in dense areas.
If we reversed it, it would not be a measurable difference to over-sea pollution, but it would drastically increase over-land pollution.
The issue isn't that shipping doesn't cause air pollution. It's what kind of pollution does it create (few articles state this explicitly), and with what consequences.
In general, you have the following emissions from any fossil-fuel combustion process:
- Water vapour. This is virtually never harmful.
- CO2. This is not immediately toxic, but is a greenhouse gas, and net emissions must be reduced globally.
- Other combustion chemical products. Generally small fractions total emissions, though potentially hazardous to humans, including NOx (nitrous oxides), SO2 (sulfur dioxide), O3 (ozone), and trace pollutants such as mercury. All are bioactive or biotoxic.
- Physical emissions. In particular, fine particulate matter, essentially soot, most especially PM2.5 (2.5 micron particles). These are physical irritants and can contribute to lung injury and disease, among other factors.
Stating "ships emit X amount of pollutants" without specifying the pollutants is worse than useless, and often deliberately misleading.
Total CO2 emissions are wholly a function of the amount of fuel burned. Shipping is about 3% of total fossil fuel consumption, and hence, of total CO2 emissions. On net, and especially based on the total tonnage and value of goods moved, shipping is the most efficient form of transportation available. It is low polluting in terms of CO2.
Where ships trail, badly, is in particulate and chemical emissions. Ship fuel is "bunker oil", basically the last grade of petroleum above asphalt, and having a consistency when cold of tar or even a solid. Worse, it's also typically high in impurities, including sulfur, mercury, and other elements and chemicals. And when burnt tends to product high amounts of particulates. Given the regulatory environment, multinational, international waters, diverse, and often a race-to-the-bottom of bare minimum standards, marine emissions of these pollutants is high.
As a somewhat saving grace, these pollutants do tend to settle out quickly, and hence don't reside long in the atmosphere. Some, especially mercury, do reside in (and worse, bioaccumulate and concentrate) in life, which is why eating carnivorous fish (tuna, shark, swordfish) is not recommended.
But the full picture on shipping is that its pollutant levels vary greatly, compared to other sources, and in environmental impacts depending on the specific pollutants in question.
Sorry, your question's unclear, and ungrammatical.
What are you referring to by "settle out" and maps?
The map patterns are persistent because shipping traffic is constant, and there are a huge number of ships (~80,000 large cargo vessels worldwide), largely concentrated on narrow sea lanes. You can observe SO2 emissions along sea lanes using the Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser: https://earth.nullschool.net
There are 100,000 vessels passing through the Strait of Malacca every year, that's over 270 per day.
As for other pollutants.
Elevated atmospheric CO2 due to industrial fossil fuel combustion is thought to extend for centuries to millennia.
The residence time of PM2.5 is on the order of 2-5 days. See:
10.1016/0048-9697(84)90285-7
Journal: Science of The Total Environment Volume: 36 Issues: none 339--346
Title: Atmospheric residence time of carbonaceous particles and particulate pah compounds
Author(s): Jürgen Müller
Publisher: Elsevier Science
Year: 1984
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
>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).
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.
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.
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.
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...). 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-...). 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.
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).
Here's the paper: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...