Safe Speed Forums

OMG - a book now? Aren't the posts enough without that?

Funnily enough, they arnt!

There would appear to be aspects of "Transition" that take place at the beginning and end of ice ages that happen very quickly indeed. Ice ages are not well understood at all! (Geologists have historically been scared of sudden large events and have avoided them as explanations as far as possible. They only recently accepted the idea that there were MASSIVE flash floods in NW USA at the end of the last ice age)



True, but this only works if we are taking the right action for ther right reason.

During the black death it was "Common Knowlege" that the plague was casd by Witches. It was also "Common Knowledge" that Cats were Witches familiars and agents of the dark one! As a consequence Cats were rounded up in vast numbers and killed (typically by being tortured to death)

This was, of course, a BAD move!

The only effective way of reducing Mankinds effect on the enviroment is to reduce the numbers. Us (In the UK) reducing our own consumption of the black stuff (even supposing that an overall reduction in black stuff consumption would make any diference anyway) wil not result in an overall reduction. It will simply be consumed elsewhere.

OPEC is currently declining to increace production in response to the high prices. They claim that they do not believe it is nececarry. Personally I recon that they are actually at their production limit and couldnt produce any more even if they wanted to!

(See http://dieoff.org/42Countries/42Countries.htm)

Basically black stuff consumption is set to decline dramatically over the next century regardless of what anybody plans.

(Governments will, no doubt, use this factor in order to claim that their "Green Policies" worked! Ho Humm, Where have we seen this before)



Poor analogy, a better one is living in a house called "Clifftop" in dorset.

Do you spend your cash on;

a) Lobbying the UN/going to confernces in Bali

or

b) Tipping rubble on the beech to slow down the erosion and/or moving further inland.

As a nation we need to be doing less of a) and rather more of b)! In particular we need to be aiming to achieve energy/food neutrality. we also need to achive and maintain an independent industrial/scientific/engineering infrastructure.

Added to that, we need more people in these islands like we need collective holes in our heads. Indeed, a steady decline in population to 19th century levels would be desirable.

And what is government policy??

the opposite of all of the above!



I know! Thats why I called it the Canute anaology

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Heh, thats kinda the wrong way around. Theres no proof its doing anything bad, and it is of benefit to society.

"Oh noes, the weather is getting warmer/colder/warmer again/orange, better find some way to make our lives more difficult under the arrogant misconception that we can do anything about it!"

That's probably what they said about asbestos.

On a local level damn straight it's bad, unless you think it's a good idea to burn fossil fuels in amongst the population?

It wasn't long ago we all had our personal energy "power plants" in our houses powered by coal, it made the local atmosphere so bad they made it illegal.

Don't know about you but if there is a viable alternative I'd rather cars didn't have to burn petrol or diesel to move around.

Since there is already an IPCC report that says that climate change is unstoppable, even if we all stopped driving cars and halted industry, why bother even trying ?

Oh, and it also says that while it is unstoppable we can still stop it if we try.

Something like a mixed message there.

Anyway, out to remove the cat...and slightly enrich the mixture....need more CO2....too cold out there..

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Not illegal , just made using smokey fuel illegal.
Days gone past (time BW (BEFORE WEEPY ))we all had coal fires -one in each room , with a massive one in the kitchen (to cook on ).(If you were rich).

Then came the advent of hot water , heated in a back boiler , then not too long after the idea of heating enough hot water to send round radiatrs evolved .
But then coal was messy ,difficult to light and sometimes needed the right knack - I used to get ours to light ,Mrs B couldn't.
Modern times demanded modern methods - something that did not entail cleaning out a fireplace first thing in the morning .

Hence coal type fires died ,as oil/gas fires only required lighting .

And of course the imported coal is not as good quality -so smokes more than the old British stuff .

Only good thing (apart from not having to clean out and light a fire ) is the effect on the envirnoment - I can remember 196xs smogs in London .

Any historians about to confirm my remembreance of childhood days ??

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

But then snow in April isn't all that unusual, I can remember it happening a few times during my childhood (30+ years ago). And about 20 years ago I recall having a couple of inches in mid June.

It's only the doom mongerers who grasp every weather event and blame it on climate change.

Strange that in April last year we were bombarded with global warming nonsense because of the unseasonably mild weather (that we now are told this is natural variation).

The global warming muppets are continually changing their pitch to keep pace with the increasingly untenable science. The latest spin is that the last 10 years of stable temperatures still show an upward trend....go figure.

Sorry chap...the game is up

Global warming protagonists are going to get a well deserved kicking this year. The majority (yes the majority) of the public are sick to the back teeth with all this cobblers. It won’t be long before the ranks of the science community are broken as more an reports back off from the “absolute” nature of man made global warming theory. Even the heavily politically biased IPCC report fell short of saying that man was 100% responsible for the temperature variation we are seeing.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Whereas this thread was started by somebody to "prove" that global warming is not happening because it's snowing in mid April...

I do rememeber once seeing a guy on the news standing knee deep in water saying he'd lived there all his life and never remembered such floods; behind him was a high water mark from 1960 (a year in which this guy was surely compus mentus) about a metre above the water level that he was standing in.

Er....

Sorry we were told last year that the hot April WAS a sign of global warming. You cannot have it both ways.

We are also told this year will be one of the coldest this century.

You can always tell when science is in trouble then you have to try and make the facts fit the theory. That is exactly what is happening now. The sea temperature (which was hailed as a sure sign of global warming) has not warmed up so lets find something else quick.

The latest thing they have ome up with is that global warming makes the weather more unpredictable......

In other words...we are crap at forecasting the weather and its all the fault of CO2 emissions......now thats just taking the piss

If you remember the winter of 06 was going to be severe...wrong. Then the summer of 2007 was going to be hotter than 2003...also wrong. Its a joke.

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Speed camera policy Kills

I reckon that very few others "like people" as you claim to do. My evidence? Just look at how many objections you get to planning applications put in for new housing projects. The locals would accept the 20 (with expensive cars) but don't want the 1,000 (all cyclists).

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

It is a problem called "the age trap"
People are living longer (although not all in good health).

They are retiring at anything from 50-65.

Those retired need to live, so they need money.

So they need others to work, to supply money.

More old retired = need for more young working.

And I'm told by a "pension adviser" that even if they have been able to supply their own pension pot, they still need people to work to continue to support their investments.

A vicious circle.

the solution seems to be to retire people to a graveyard, whether they want it or not, at sometime when their ability to produce declines.

AHHHH...that brings us to the NHS...I see the solution !

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

20 years ago I predicted what was going to happen with regard to pensions. My Dad (then a senior exec in Shell, so economically aware IYSWIM) thought I was being unreasonably pessimistic. More recently he acnoledged that not only was I right but that the "Nature" of my predictions were pretty well on the money

The point is that "Pensions" as they were being promoted in the early eighties and more recently are economically unsustainable. The whole concept is flawed.

It is not possible for more than a tiny %age of the population to acumulate enough savings over a working lifetime to become economically independent for more than a few years.

People have been lead to believe that you can accumulate enough in a pension pot to live well for decades after "retirement".

It is impossible!

The rot started to set in when governments refused to face the facts and raise "state" pension age in line with increacing life expectancy. (remembe, when the state pension was first brought in, many people didnt even live to claim it and those that did typically only survived to draw it for less than 5 yrs before croaking. As a result providing a reasonable pension to "retired" people did not put an excessive strain on the rest of the economy.)

The writing was really on the wall when the government scrapped SERPS and encouraged people to take out priviate pensions instead. If the Government couldnt afford SERPS how in the hell did anybody think the private sector could either!??

There is are ways of dealing with the "Age Trap" (that do not involve euthanasia ) but they are somewhat radical and only a trusted and honost government would be able to cary the policy out (ie not compatable with curent politics )

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Ah, but they don't weepej! I agree and disagree with you:

You're analogy works if people leave the world as the enter it or in the words of the late great Paul Eddington "do little harm". But the stark fact is they don't. Everyone aspires to the Western way.

So realistically, how green can a world be with 10 billion, 20 billion all aspiring to get: -

A car
A TV
A fridge
An un-green house
Artificial clothes and poisionous food from intensive farming to extract enough for the ever-expanding population. etc. etc.


Also, space is important to all creatures no matter how green we are. I have to travel miles to see something other than concrete and in my short lifetime I've seen huge areas of green subsituted for yet more bricks and mortar.


So to put it a different way, I'd rather there were a fraction of the current population so we could all enjoy more space and a better quality of life instead of flooding the world with humans and loosing the beautiful, more natural, world we once had.

The harmful effects would have negligible effect if we live in harmony with nature and part of that balance is respect for other life on this planet and mother earth herself.

How many go from their semi in Kent to a mud hut in Namibia?

I'm not a misanthropist but if most peoples' idea of utopia is a world of 20 or 50 BILLION humans all trying to be very green but with absolutely no quality of life then I'll be glad not to be a part of it.

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

We’ve had these discussions before Tone. I’ve said as you have, it’s population that will kill off our mother earth, if we keep going at the rate we are, something will have to happen where population is reduced.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

[quote="Big Tone]
How many go from their semi in Kent to a mud hut in Namibia?

[quote]

Shush Tone - you'll spoil the FCO recruiting campaign (That's the new British Embassy building in Namibia )


On the other hand the man that owns the mud hut probably has his real house behind the trees along with his jeep and TV ,and rents out the mud hut to British backpackers on a GAP year

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Haven't some of the 'on message' climate scientists recently conceded that there has not yet been any warming this century, but that it is likely to start again "in 2009" for some reason?

Starts to sound to me like one of those end-of-the-world cults that have to keep postponing the apocalypse when it doesn't happen.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

So what we REALLY need is for a new predator to evolve in small numbers that can feast on humans in large numbers to help balance out our ever growing populations :p

...or a small predator to evolve in large numbers and feast on humans, say, a virus?