Towns May Shut Off Tap On Home Car Washing

[Vytenis]

Wall Street Journal article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119673690719012753.html

[ccm911]

Geez!  Will we have any rights left at all in the future?  I feel it s my god given right as an American to wash my car in the driveway!  Just another ploy to enrichen the commercial car wash lobby!

[Darren]

Whatever, just nonsense.  Agricultural run-off is a much bigger problem.  Just look at the Chesapeake -- when I was a kid we could catch crabs by the bushelfull with nothing more than a boat, some string, and chicken necks.  It wasn't hard, I did it when I was 6.  Now forget it, you might catch 1-2 all day if you are lucky.

Some years when I was a kid, there were areas where we could wander into 2' water with a net and scoop them up.

If car washing is such a huge issue, then make a push towards eco-friendly car soap.  This is all stupid politics at it's best.  How much grease is really washed off a car?  On my car it's mostly bird feces -- we wouldn't want to get that into our water ways!

If you want to read about real issues in our area, check out the Chesapeake Bay Foundation at www.cbf.org

The Bay is in bad shape --

"The unspoiled Bay ecosystem described by Captain John Smith in the 1600s, with its extensive forests and wetlants, clear water, abundant fish and oysters, and lush growths of submerged vegetation serves as the benchmark, and would rate a 100 on CBF's scale.  Blue crab harvests this year are expected to be amont the lowest since the 1940's"

The Bay is now at a 28 according to this rating system.

[ccm911]

Darren:

And I'll bet the crabs you caught were probably larger than what you get today.  Boy that sounds great, though, going out and catching a bushel of crabs.  Today, they ar just so expensive.  And pretty small.  I just read an article about the oyster fisherman in Florida.  Same story.

I fully agree that the wetlands need to be tended to.  And I am no tree-hugger, it is just that we can't let the whole country become one large suburb.

Now for car washing?  To quote the NRA: "They will pry my hose from my cold dead hands".

[APXD 30]

My father actively crabs DE during the summer.   He tells me that crabs grow larger by the end of the summer due to increase exposure to warmer waters.

If one would subscribes to the Nobel-Prize-touter's logic, it would mean that crabs of today than in the past because of global hocus-pocus.   However, that's not the case.   It's also pretty cold out even before winter officially begins.

Could the inventor of the internet and NP recipient be wrong? 

[ccm911]

It is funny you say that.  A buddy of mine is really into the Environmental Scinces, and he is saying that he is not yet convinced about Global Warming. 

If the earth is a billion years old, and we have only been tracking weather or about two hundred years, can we really draw any relevant conclusions?

And if it were not for changing weather patterns, wouldn't we still be in the Ice Age?

I just don't know.

[Darren]

There was an interesting article in August's Scientific American about further evidence on the reality of Global Warming -- It made sense, but I get confused whenever the statistics are too involved.  It does seem true, however, that the artic ice cap is shrinking fairly quickly.

In a sense, I agree that it seems somewhat arrogant to think we can affect the ecology so much in such a little time.

It's true that crabs seem bigger now than they ever were, but that could be due to a number of factors.  Less competition for food for one.  I'm basing this on what I can buy at restaurants, etc, and I guess I don't know for sure where they come from.

[Wellardmac]

One the original topic of car washing - it had occured to me also that it was a bogus ban motivated by emotion rather than facts.

As for global warming - I'm with you both on this.

The reality is that global warming is happening, but there are two issues that most choose to ignore - Chris identified one issue, which is that we have not been recording temperatures for long enough to be sure of cause-effect. The other is that geologists have shown that there is a natural cycle to temperature anyway and what we're seeing could be part of the natural cycle of things.

The part that is upsetting some scientists is the rate of warming, which appears to be faster than in previous cycles. The other is a genuine fear of extinction and an arrogant belief that we could stop that from happening.

I would say that if we have changed the natural cycle and sped up the rate of change, then almost certainly things have moved beyond the point where the damage has already been done and it's just a question of letting nature take it's course and seeing if we can ride out the consequences.

Here's the sad thing - the developed world is making an effort to minimize damage, when in fact we did our bit to damage the environment over the last 150 years. The real damage right now is being done in the rapidly developing economies of China, India and Africa - Those countries are not the areas that are attempting to modify their behavior to help the situation, so what we do here in the Americas and Europe will have little effect. The reality is that on a bad day in many Chinese cities you cannot see across the street due to the smog (look up the measures that China is taking to clean up their act during the olympics) and if you were to wipe your face with a white towel at the end of a day, then it would be brown from accumulated airborne pollutants that you had been exposed to through the day.

One thing that most scientists agree upon is that nature is the most powerful force - it will get it's own way and it is self-correcting for all things that happen in a given ecosystem.

If we truly are having an influence upon our environment, then nature is just compensating. I really don't see any point in fighting it, as nature will win.

We can try and slow the effects on nature down, but in the long run the human race will go the same way as the dinosaurs - it's just a matter of whether we self-destruct, or if we influence our environment enough to force nature to make us extinct.

At best (assuming no other environmental changes) we are heading towards a global population of 9 billion and that is not sustainable. Nature will compensate in a manner that will force a population reduction or remove the population entirely.

Evolution is a wonderful force. Sleep well.

[Wellardmac]

Interesting follow-up that my wife just shared.

NASA Goddard Research Center has recently published a study on global CO2 emissions and they noted that in developed countries there is a measurable decline in CO2 emissions (as measured from space) on Sundays when we mostly relax for the day. In Israel the same thing happens on Saturday and the phenomenon never happens in China, as they are active every day of the week.

Interesting stuff. Now, what was I saying about humans not having an effect?

[AMoore]

ccm911 wrote:

If the earth is a billion years old, and we have only been tracking weather or about two hundred years, can we really draw any relevant conclusions?

I would suggest that there are more ways to determine climate history than by contemporaneous recordings.