Necrachilles wrote:
It makes me wonder, and this could just be really stupid because I'm too lazy to check the facts but
How lulz would it be if the greenhouse effect wasn't causing our ice to melt and raise the levels of water but rather all the huge ass boats we're putting in it. Has to have some effect even if very small.
I ran the numbers out of curiousity. The sea level rise over the last century is ~1.8 mm per year. The surface area of the oceans is ~3.6 x 10^8 sq km. Volume increase per year = (1.8 x 10^-3 m) x (3.6 x 10^11 sq m) = 6.5 x 10^8 cu m per year. The density of seawater is about 1.0x10^3 kg/cu m. Thus if the rise in sea level was entirely due to more ships being put on the ocean each year, that would be (1.0 x 10^3 kg/cu m) x (6.5 x 10^8 cu m) = 6.5 x 10^11 kg, or 650 000 000 metric tonnes of displacement for new ships being built per year (with no old ships ever being retired). That would be 34 000 of these aircraft carriers built per year, every year for the last century, with all of them still afloat.
