Unthreaded
pg 19 The Times : Their Green Loony reporter Ben Webster writes:
Climate experts at war over prediction of ice-free Arctic reproduced at climatism.wordpress
....Mainly digging at Wadhams ..it quotes Ed Hawkins
and Richard Betts, ..Writing on the same climate science website, he said: “When someone talks up imminent catastrophe, they might think they are getting a quick win by getting a scary story out there, but in the long term it will be an own goal.”
...well the alarmists could have killed such hype stories much earlier
stewgreen
I am not great public speaker, but I think with a lot of things in life ; like with cancer and death you just take things one step at a time. My mothers had 30 years of media telling her “cancer is a death sentence, scary scary"…so she’s a big worrier, whereas the reality is complex things it’s not as simple as that, and with new tech having advanced plenty of cancers do get eradicated or controlled. I didn’t exist in 1966 and probably won’t exist in 2066. If you are 70 something and you get a serious cancer diagnosis like “this cancer could kill you” the context is that life without cancer is also terminal. Few of us are going to be toddling along at 100. You can’t change the past, so you can only look forward and take one step at a time. Sometime in stepping up the mountain you finally do get to the top, other times it turns out to be a false top and hte final end, the summit of life is further on past the mist.
- The same applies for the climate debate. We might go on step at a time or one brick at a time, thinking we are making no progress, but one day we will find ourselves at the summit, looking down at a new world,
...just as there was a time when humans thought sacrificing virgins was good, and then a time when they realised it isn’t.
stewgreen
ACK 10:18 Bits of the A3 have fencing to reduce the risk of deer etc running across the road. As you note, deer can jump, or find their way through holes or simply gain access from an unfenced part. Once spooked and panicked by noise and headlights, they can't escape the way they came, and are trapped on the road by the fences designed to keep them off it.
I would support the use of police marksmen under such circumstances.
Mercedes launched the A-Class 20(?) years ago. A Scandinavian motoring magazine subjected it to their "Elk Test", the ability to swerve at speed to avoid an Elk, nothing to do with survivabilty of an impact. It failed, Mercedes redesigned the suspension geometry. Presumably deer etc are not allowed to cross the road in Germany.
golf charlie
Apologies! PESTRIANS was a typo.
golf charlie
ACK, SandyS Lapogus et al
I have never YET hit a deer even a small one, but I have seen the damage to deer, vehicles and occupants. Within 10 minutes of home on the Downs, I would reckon on seeing at least one deer, once a week on average over a year, normally on roads where I would not be driving at more than 25mph anyway.
My first car back in the 1980s was a sscondhand Mk1 Ford Fiesta, during the time Ford rebodied the Cortina into the Sierra. The dramatic change in shape was about a new look, speed, fuel efficiency etc, but the aerodynamic front end gave pedestrians and other animals a better chance of suffering progressive injuries on hitting bonnet and windscreen, rather than just the blunt radiator grille. Combined with softer materials and plastic bumpers etc, the number of pestrians killed/injured by vehicle impact has reduced, but the cost of repairing cars has gone up.
The 1980s also saw the rise in popularity of Aussie outback style bullbars and roobars fitted to Chelsea tractors, designed to protect them from migrating herds of traffic bollards, known to gallop unpredictably all over the roads of Knightsbridge, late on a Friday night. Road safety campaigners were delighted with scenes reminiscent of rutting stags with their antlers locked together, as Roo-Barred Range Rovers became entangled and Roo-Bar knotted outside private Nursery Schools, in the urban jungles of Kensington.
The use of bull bars cancelled out all the other improvements in safety to other road users.
I always slow down for horses on the road. I have seen the damage a horse/pony can do to a car!
golf charlie
Iapogus. OK I take your point. The main point to telling golfCharlie my story was not discuss the effect of deer on vehicles but the fact that deer can jump fences put there deliberately to keep them out. The country through which the Trans Canada passed was open rangeland with scattered woods; county in which all resident Albertans would know wapiti and other aminals roam. It's as much their land as ours.
Why aren't the roads you mentioned fenced or are they? If only for the protection of this particular hazard.
ACK
ACK - it doesn't really matter whether it is a red or elk; if you are driving at 60mph and you hit a red deer it will very likely right-off your car. If you are unlikely it will come through the windscreen and kill you. Roe deer also. That's why the police have been shooting roes at night on the A9 just north of Dunkeld for years now. (I assume they get a license from SNH but knowing Tayside Police / Police Scotland who generally act above the law, probably not). I have had lucky escapes with reds at Drumochter and elsewhere when they wander onto the road at night. Red deer are a serious risk to motorists on the A82 and A87 also. Both roe and red deer are pests in the Highlands and in most areas their populations need to be culled significantly to bring the uplands back to it's ecological carrying capacity. Grouse on the other hand...
lapogus
SandyS. I'm not disputing that an encounter with a roe deer on the road can be catastrophic, but there is no comparison with wapiti, also known as elk. A bull elk can weigh up.to ten times what a roebuck would. An impact between even a female elk, which those I saw were, with a vehicle travelling in excess of 120kph would do serious damage even to a humvee. We were spared seeing the full outcome of the incident as we were forced to travel onwards on the other side of the dividend multi-lane highway. On our approach we had been watching the small herd and were powerless to prevent the incident. The drivers of the vehicles had plenty of time to see the elk, and opportunities to avoid them as traffic towards Calgary was light. Nearby was a tunnel beneath the highway designed to allow animals to pass. Why that particular herd chose to ignore it is a puzzle.
Most of the deer we see near Norwich are not roedeer, but the much smaller munkjac which we commonly also see as roadkill.
ACK
rhoda
I'm surprised how little acrimony there is in the Bishop's absence and echo Green Sand's thoughts. It is a credit to the Bishop and how he ran this blog in the years before his prolonged absence that civilised (mainly) discussion has continued for so long.
SandyS
Settled science : Salford prof shows that if carpark spaces are set at 45 degrees, then you can have a narrower access lane and therefore fit in 5 cars to land blocks previously taking only 3.
BTW The Wadhams article isalso covered in Oz with open comments