Commercial Ships Spew Half As Much Particulate Pollution As World’s Cars
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Commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate pollutants into the air globally as the total amount released by the world’s cars, according to a new study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The study is the first to provide a global estimate of maritime shipping’s total contribution to air particle pollution based on direct emission measurements. The authors estimate ships emit about 1,100 tons of particle pollution globally each year.
Ship pollutants affect both global climate and the health of people living along coastlines, according to the study authors. The findings appear online the week of Feb. 23 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
“Since more than 70 percent of shipping traffic takes place within 250 miles of the coastline, this is a significant health concern for coastal communities,” said lead study author Daniel Lack, a researcher with the NOAA-supported CU Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder.
Earlier research by one of the study’s co-authors, James Corbett of the University of Delaware, linked particle pollution to premature deaths among coastal populations.
Commercial ships emit both particle pollution and carbon dioxide, but they have opposite effects on the climate, said the researchers. The particles have a global cooling effect that is at least five times greater than the global warming effect from the ships’ CO2 emissions.
The particles affect both climate and health, said the researchers. CO2 from ships makes up roughly 3 percent of all human-emitted CO2 and almost 30 percent of smog-forming nitrogen oxide gases.
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