Cylists without lights - disproportionately annoys me!!

parkmalco

Bowling_4_Gold wrote: »

What a load of rubbish. Maybe if you understood all the money you pay to plonk your car on the road is to deter you from using it, to help decrease the huge volume of emissions it generates, you would give cyclists a bit more respect (or do you think Carbon Dioxide is a lie too?).

What do you do when you see a G-Whizz or Prius on the road? Overtake it leaving millimetres, in a sudden fit of rage you have?

thats funny i thought plants and trees need carbon dioxide to live.carbon dioxide is not an enemy.
global weather records show no distingushable trend up or down in temperature over the past century.

parkmalco

interesting reading from the association of british drivers web site.sorry if i am going off topic.
The Association of British Drivers
Green Myths On Global Warming — Debunked 1 MYTH Planet earth is currently undergoing global warming FACT Accurate and representative temperature measurements from satellites and balloons show that the planet has cooled significantly in the last two or three years, losing in only 18 months 15% of the claimed warming which took over 100 years to appear — that warming was only one degree fahrenheit (half of one degree Celsius) anyway, and part of this is a systematic error from groundstation readings which are inflated due to the 'urban heat island effect' i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming...and it is these, 'false high' ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models, which live up to the GIGO acronym — garbage in, garbage out.
2 MYTH Even slight temperature rises are disastrous, ice caps will melt, people will die FACT In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, also parts of ice caps are melting yet other parts are thickening but this isn't reported as much (home experiment: put some water in a jug or bowl, add a layer of ice cubes and mark the level — wait until the ice has melted and look again, the level will have fallen). Data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime.
3 MYTH Carbon Dioxide levels in our atmosphere at the moment are unprecedented (high). FACT Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently only 350 parts per million have been over 18 times higher in the past at a time when cars, factories and power stations did not exist — levels rise and fall without mankind's help.
4 MYTH Mankind is pumping out carbon dioxide at a prodigious rate. FACT 96.5% of all carbon dioxide emissions are from natural sources, mankind is responsible for only 3.5%, with 0.6% coming from fuel to move vehicles, and about 1% from fuel to heat buildings. Yet vehicle fuel (petrol) is taxed at 300% while fuel to heat buildings is taxed at 5% even though buildings emit nearly twice as much carbon dioxide!
5 MYTH Carbon dioxide changes in the atmosphere cause temperature changes on the earth. FACT A report in the journal 'Science' in January of this year showed using information from ice cores with high time resolution that since the last ice age, every time when the temperature and carbon dioxide levels have shifted, the carbon dioxide change happened AFTER the temperature change, so that man-made global warming theory has put effect before cause — this shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! What's more, both water vapour and methane are far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide but they are ignored.
6 MYTH Reducing car use will cut carbon dioxide levels and save the planet FACT The planet does not need saving, but taking this on anyway, removing every car from every road in every country overnight would NOT produce any change in the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, as can be seen using the numbers from Fact 4, and in any case it is pointless trying to alter climate by changing carbon dioxide levels as the cause and effect is the other way round — it is changes in the activity of the Sun that cause temperature changes on earth, with any temperature rise causing carbon dioxide to de-gas from the oceans.
7 MYTH The recent wet weather and flooding was caused by mankind through 'global warming' FACT Extreme weather correlates with the cycle of solar activity, not carbon dioxide emissions or political elections, the recent heavy rainfall in winter and spring is a perfect example of this — it occurred at solar maximum at a time when solar maxima are very intense — this pattern may well repeat every 11 years until about 2045.
8 MYTH The climate change levy, petrol duty, CO2 car tax and workplace parking charges are justifiable environmental taxes. FACT As carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories does not have any measurable impact on climate, these taxes are 'just another tax' on enterprise and mobility, and have no real green credentials.
9 MYTH Scientists on the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issue reports that say 'global warming' is real and that we must do something now. FACT Scientists draft reports for the IPCC, but the IPCC are bureaucrats appointed by governments, in fact many scientists who contribute to the reports disagree with the 'spin' that the IPCC and media put on their findings.
The latest report suggests that the next 100 years might see a temperature change of 6 Celsius yet a Lead Author for the IPCC (Dr John Christy UAH/NASA) has pointed out that the scenarios with the fastest warming rates were added to the report at a late stage, at the request of a few governments — in other words the scientists were told what to do by politicians.
10 MYTH There are only a tiny handful of maverick scientists who dispute that man-made global warming theory is true. FACT There are nearly 18,000 signatures from scientists worldwide on a petition called The Oregon Petition which says that there is no evidence for man-made global warming theory nor for any impact from mankind's activities on climate.
Many scientists believe that the Kyoto agreement is a total waste of time and one of the biggest political scams ever perpetrated on the public ... as H L Mencken said "the fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" ... the desire to save the world usually fronts a desire to rule it.

esuhl

Harry_Flashman wrote: »

It seems the majority of your argument is based on a possible accident that may never happen...

It's called statistical probability. If you drive a car, you are more likely to kill someone than if you ride a bike. If I smoke 60 cigarettes a day, I will be more likely to die early. Or would you say that I'm "just talking about a possible early death that may never happen"? Perhaps you think that cigarettes are healthy and heroin is harmless fun.

Harry_Flashman wrote: »

... and very dubious 'eco-warrior' evidence (I don't believe in global warming either - as you may have guessed ).

So, you don't believe that burning fossil fuels causes pollution? The smog in Beijing must be an illusion, and the corrleation between increased mortality rates and exposure to air pollution is obviously just a coincidence. Maybe asthma-sufferers are just putting it on, eh?

And let me get this right... You don't believe that heavy, fast-moving objects are more likely to result in fatalities than light, slow-moving ones?

Harry_Flashman wrote: »

I would hate to drive an emission free car - without exception, they are poxy little boxes which don't compare to the enjoyment of 'proper' motors.

What you would prefer to drive is irrelevant, but getting on your high horse about how motorists have "more of a moral right" to use roads is clearly nonsensical. I have my tongue firmly in my cheek when I suggest that it is cyclists who have more of a right to use the roads, but your arguments just aren't coherent.

parkmalco

esuhl wrote: »

So, you don't believe that burning fossil fuels causes pollution? The smog in Beijing must be an illusion, and the corrleation between increased mortality rates and exposure to air pollution is obviously just a coincidence. Maybe asthma-sufferers are just putting it on, eh?
.

apparently talcum powder has been found to be the blame for a lot of asthma sufferers and the nhs currently discourage its use on newborns.
of course breathing in anything other than oxygen is likely to cause us harm.

esuhl

parkmalco wrote: »

plants and trees need carbon dioxide to live.carbon dioxide is not an enemy.

parkmalco wrote: »

of course breathing in anything other than oxygen is likely to cause us harm.

Ha ha! :rotfl:

I have a funny feeling that any further rational discussion might be a waste of time...

paddedjohn

another pain in the ar*e are the cyclists who are going nowhere. i can just about put up with the ones who are cycling to or from work or the shops, but local to me are a number of country roads with a 60 limit and there are idiots on their cycles all the time holding up the rush hour traffic morning and evening, and they are going nowhere, back and forth, up and down, dressed like ballet dancers in lycra, why dont they have a bit of regard for proper road users and use an exercise bike

rev_henry

parkmalco wrote: »

of course breathing in anything other than oxygen is likely to cause us harm.

:rotfl:
Did they not teach you at school about the composition of air?
And the consequences of breathing in pure oxygen?

parkmalco

rev_henry wrote: »

:rotfl:
Did they not teach you at school about the composition of air?
And the consequences of breathing in pure oxygen?

sorry i must have been off ill that day when they taught us that

adouglasmhor

Rotor wrote: »

yes bells are essential..................OR...... you could use your voice to shout a cheery "excuse me"

I have tried that, it didn't work with a fat lout whose fat family though it was OK to block both the footpath and the cycle path by the river Cart.
I don't suppose anything would have worked though.

esuhl

adouglasmhor wrote: »

I have tried that, it didn't work with a fat lout whose fat family though it was OK to block both the footpath and the cycle path by the river Cart.
I don't suppose anything would have worked though.

It can be frustrating trying to use a shared path with pedestrians. You ring your bell to warn them that you are approaching, and they either treat it as a personal insult and ignore you, not bothering to control their dog/kids... or they panic and leap to the side with a guilty look on their face as if they shouldn't be using the path at all!

Note to pedestrians using a shared cycle path:

If you hear me ring my bell, don't panic. I'm not going to mow you down or try to squeeze past you if there isn't room. My bell does not mean "get out of my way" - it's a polite warning in the interests of safety, just to let you know I'm here.

If you have kids/dogs running around and they leap out in front of me, even if I'm passing you at 3mph, they are putting themselves in danger. For their own benefit, please control them.

Don't be offended at the sound of my bell. I am not calling you a c***. I am not telling you that you shouldn't use the footpath. I am not saying that "cyclists are better than pedestrians", and I'm not Harry Flashman, so I don't think that I have a greater moral right to use the path because I've paid for a bike and you haven't.