Friday, March 26, 2010

When Forecasts Prove False

The Federal 55 mph speed limit was eliminated in 1995, see Section 205(d), despite apocalyptic predictions by lefties:
"history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life." (Ralph Nader)

"eliminating federal highway safety requirements . . . are equivalent to a death sentence to thousands of Americans back home." (Joan Claybrook, president of the Naderite advocacy group Public Citizen)
Well, that didn't happen:
The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced that the number of overall traffic fatalities reported at the end of 2009 reached the lowest level since 1954, declining for the 15th consecutive quarter. According to early projections, the fatality rate, which takes into account the number of miles traveled, reached the lowest level ever recorded.
I'm not saying faster is safer. Just that the "precautionary" lobby failed to account for exogenous factors like increased seat belt use, safer cars and better roads. And they still do.

Just as enviros model mostly static circumstances of dubious predictive value to back, say, global warming.

2 comments:

OBloodyHell said...

I did have a comment written but blogger's comment programmers are totally incompetent morons, and it ate the whole thing.

>:-/

A_Nonny_Mouse said...

"Global warming", right. I just had to shovel another 10" of slushy "global warming" off my driveway on Wednesday...

By the way, if "climatic instability due to global warming" can be blamed as causing some of the wild winter weather we've had this year (plus hurricanes, too!) might it also be possible that there could be "climatic instability due to global cooling"?

Maybe some of us should band together and promote Anthropogenic Global Cooling, complete with fudged data and data-crunching program enhancements that tweak averages downward. But I draw a blank when trying to figure how I might construct offsets (and, offsets of what??) that I can bank or sell in order to make MY garbanzitillion dollars from the racket...