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.
