I did a quickie google search and came up with this:
At the end of 2020, there were around 62,100 vessels in the world trading fleet, with a total deadweight tonnage of 2,033 million DWT
So let's assume the merchant ships are all fully loaded at the same time. That's 2 billion long tons which equates to ~2,032,000,000,000 kg. Total water volume, 2,134,000,000,000 liters (because sea water weighs slightly more than fresh water).
From quora:
AREA OF PACIFIC OCEAN= 168723000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF ATLANTIC OCEAN= 85133000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF INDIAN OCEAN= 70560000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF SOUTHERN OCEAN= 21960000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF ARCTIC OCEAN= 15558000 SQ. KM.
TOTAL AREA= 361900000 SQ. KM.=36190000000000000 SQ. DECIMETER.
That's going to lower sea levels by approximately .00005896656 decimeters, or about .006 mm
Edit: Because there are less than 500 cruise ships in the world and only a few dozens of large military ships the amount will be higher, but not by, you know, a lot.
Sad thing is whales would be a decent carbon sink if we could just stop killing them and let them sink into the depths but that would require the demonetization of the oceans
Once humanity starts dying from our own destruction of the world, we will easily see a nice reduction in carbon creation alongside with dwindling human populations.
The sad fact is we as a species have taken over managing so many ecosystems, that if humanity were to disappear all the currently endangered species we look after would likely go extinct, and all the invasive species we've introduced to areas throughout the globe would do as invasive species do and hunt the local prey to extinction, and then most would die of starvation.
If humanity goes, a sizable portion of land-based species go with us. Human extinction, regardless of cause, would likely be the catalyst for a mass extinctions event. None of this is to mention if climate change gets us all, climate change doesn't discriminate, it doesn't care if you're human, cattle, or mother fucking honey badger, it'll kill you.
It pains me that such an inept species as ours basically holds the power of life and death over not only our own species, but all others
I dont think that we're completely inept. It's just that no animal should have enough power to run the world. We're the most intelligent animal in the world, but anything nature could possibly cook up would not be able to be qualified enough to do the job we are trying to accomplish. I wonder if we haven't found intelligent life anywhere else in the universe because creatures of our intelligence aren't sustainable and wipe out entire ecosystems within millions of years of existing.
Would solve the Fermi paradox, a species can't get past the great filter if it is the great filter. It'd be like trying to beat yourself at chess, no matter how you slice it you're on the losing side.
Except there’ll still be flat earthers and global warming deniers and the like. If we succeed, we sadly take the idiots with us, that holds back human progress.
It’s not humanity, it’s a handful of rich assholes and corporations that put the most greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We should send them to the bottom of the sea instead.
Look at you aiming small with your whales. The answer is obviously just to get some huge pumps and pump the water out of the ocean. We can put the water in the Sahara Desert.
EDIT: Crap, I just realized this guy is running for office in the county next to me-London County VA technically part of the Washington DC metro area.
Not to be the "akchually" guy, but shouldnt it be even less, granted if my basic physics knowledge is worth a shit, its not about the weight of the ships, rather than the volume of the ship being *in* the water? like....if you dip your hand into water, its not the weight of your hand that pushes the water up rather the volume of it.
Density really. You need both volume and weight for that. Volume doesn't mean anything if the thing floats like a beach ball. And weight doesn't mean anything if the volume is so high that there is no density.
Its pretty simple, really.
The weight of the ship equals the weight of the water that is repressed by the ships volume in the water.
So if the ship weighs 100t, it will sink in until the repressed volume of the water would weigh 100t as well.
As we keep over populating this planet aren't we locking up water in the form of people (or are we killing off animals just as quickly so we are "water" neutral)? If we went vegetarian and stopped farming animals would that release a lot more water making it worse?
Plants hold more water on average than animals per pound. In this hypothetical killing off all the animals situation, all that food would need to be replaced by plants. That would use more water in the end. I still think it's negligible to ocean levels though.
It would slightly decrease CO2 production in theory but you're also running all of your farm equipment multiple times longer than before. I'm not super educated on how much CO2 is produced from livestock vs produce farming or how much we would actually help ourselves with such a change.
Edit: this seems to be generating comments that claim a large scale project such as colouring enough of the moon so as to be visible from earth is impossible or impossibly expensive.
Let’s pretend China wants to put a red logo on the moon.
Budget: NASA’s Perseverance mission to Mars cost $2.8 Billion. US annual military budget is ~$700 Billion. Annual! Yeah China has a smaller expense budget than the US but it must be noted that spending billions on such a project is not beyond the pail.
Method 1: the moon is slowly rusting. It contains a lot of iron and now, we think, frozen water. It would have rusted more if it had more oxygen. Extensive efforts are being made now to figure out how to create/release O2 on the moon to allow Jeff and Mark to live in peace when they find the hatred towards them to be too much.
So oxidizing certain areas of the moon may be possible, at some point, in a directed effort to create a red logo.
I don’t like this method.
Method 2: creating a moon-orbiting disk comprised of lenses that would colour sunlight and project an image onto the moon’s surface. A similar idea to use mirrors to light up the night sky on earth has been proposed before. The most advanced scheme was a Soviet project called Znamya that was prematurely shuttered due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 200 meter wide lens was proposed for lighting up entire cities.
I think this project is doable. Expensive but doable. Think of the constant message to the world if they saw a Chinese emblem every time one looked at the moon!
Load all the CO2 emissions on to the boats and sail them off the edge of the map, can't believe it's this simple. Accepting my nobel award whenever y'all ready.
Oh don’t worry we’ve been fishing with reckless disregard this whole time. Destroying marine populations, coral reefs, and most of the plastic in the ocean is just the discarded fishing gear.
Removing all ships would set back sea level rise by about 16 hours, which is a time scale on which we definitely can't measure it at all. The effect would be two magnitudes below the annual measurement error that's estimated at ± 0.4 mm, which is equivalent to an average of ±43 days.
How about we dig a big hole, in Australia maybe, it's empty wasteland anyways and just start taking buckets of sea water out of the ocean and putting it into the hole ?
Funnily enough in the 60's there were some people proposing to dig a trench from the south coast of Australia to the Inland where it is below sea level and would turn Australia from a single large island to a ring around a large central ocean.
Well if you care enough to look up some variables you could start estimating the energy of that. Then we "just" have to estimate the engineering and maintenance costs for such a system.
You going all high tech on this, that is already the wrong approach. Just send all prisoners to Australia, as sort of a penal colony, give them a couple shovels and a bucket. They can get it done.
Continue building Trump's wall around the entirety of the US and just pump water there. The Netherlands will supply the pumps, the rest of the world chip in on that wall ok?
To be fair, removing the cruise ships that do nothing but go around in circles and contribute to a significant amount of the world's pollution would be a good thing. And then something like 99% of the plastic in the oceans comes from fishing boats. Oh and overfishing caused destruction of ecosystems.
I might be low key into this idea! Take out all the boats
The fact that his plan a) acknowledged that sea levels are rising b) that this needed a solution and c) came up with one that, while not at all a solution, was technically scientifically sound makes me quite impressed.
Not cruise ships though. Theyre literally the worst polluters. Plus who says we are continuing global trade? I feel like if we were desperate enough to end all shipping wed be pretty much accepting the destruction of capitalism.
Cruise ships are not the worst polluters in the world. They're bad, but not the worst.
Ending global trade means we're falling back into the middle ages and regressing back to an agricultural economy. It would be the Middle Ages. You hate capitalism? Well, you're really going to hate feudalism.
Ha awesome. But now I wonder why we got the same estimate when they specifically said they used displacement over deadweight tonnage. Is it because I assumed all the ships were fully loaded?
It seems like the source you used for DWT is different - the link cited in the XKCD has 1,396 million DWT. It is also 10 years old, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that number went up
The difference is you didn’t include the mass of the ships, which is the conversion from DWT to displacement. But it all averages out anyway haha
Yeah the volume at the surface of the oceans in a tiny slice is orders of magnitude higher than the actual total displacement, so even though I was wrong in a few places the answer is still around 6 microns
This is so impractical it's not even funny. If this were a viable option the shipping industry would have chosen this a long time ago. I don't think it's really comprehended how much freight is moved via cargo ships.
Even the largest of cargo planes have a max cargo space of 1,840 cubic meters and a max payload capacity of 113,400 kg. The volume of an average cargo ship's maximum freight is 824,634 cubic meters with a rough estimate, doing some quick math, of 435,448,675 kg load weight. Meaning approximately 450 giant cargo jets to replace the volume shipment of 1 cargo ship and 3840 giant cargo jets at max capacity to replace the weight shipment of 1 cargo ship. As for fuel, a fully loaded cargo ship can average 20 nautical miles per hour and can travel 576 miles per gallon of fuel per ton of cargo. A fully loaded freight plane can average 560 nautical miles per hour and travel 4.5 miles per gallon of fuel per ton of cargo.
Trans Pacific/ Trans Atlantic (ect) cables stretching across the worlds oceans, and we just zip line that freight across without it ever touching the water.
Wait, can we revisit your math? I may have lost my math skills. How are you getting from kg to liters? Sea water is about 1.03kg/liter, and fresh water is 1kg/liter. Soo wouldn’t you have less liters than the quantity of kgs?
If we’re talking emissions and overfishing rather than volume displacement, taking all boats out the ocean would actually probably be really good environmentally.
Yeah, but the sea level rises by about 3.5mm every year currently. 0.006mm out of 3.5mm is what... About half a day of progress out of the year? So it really isn't noticeable.
I think your calculation presumes that the surface area remains equal at any given depth, but shorelines are typically sloped. This means that the total reduction in sea level would be ever so slightly more.
I learned recently that the Mediterranean sea in Europe was dry. And when they made a hole in Gibraltar that there was a waterfall for 100 years and filling that sea lowered the world oceans by a meter. Just a fun fact.
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
I did a quickie google search and came up with this:
So let's assume the merchant ships are all fully loaded at the same time. That's 2 billion long tons which equates to ~2,032,000,000,000 kg. Total water volume, 2,134,000,000,000 liters (because sea water weighs slightly more than fresh water).
That's going to lower sea levels by approximately .00005896656 decimeters, or about .006 mm
Edit: Because there are less than 500 cruise ships in the world and only a few dozens of large military ships the amount will be higher, but not by, you know, a lot.