HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-08-13, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 2015. PAGE 5.
“E verybody talks about the weather
but nobody does anything about
it.”
Did Samuel Langhorn Clemens say
that? There’s some confusion about it, but
if he didn’t, he should have. In any case,
something happened on the 25th of October,
1859 (when the man who would become better
known as Mark Twain was just 24 years old)
which would compel authorities to finally ‘do
something’ about the weather.
It unfolded off the coast of Wales. A steam
clipper by the name of Royal Charter was in
the final leg – final day, actually – of a two
month voyage from Melbourne Australia to
Liverpool. Five hundred passengers and crew
were aboard, desperate to feel some solid earth
under their feet. With the green and pleasant
promise of England beckoning just over the
horizon, spirits were soaring.
But the weather was looking...odd. The
barometer was falling and there was an
unearthly haze in the distance. The captain
might have taken shelter in a nearby harbour,
but he elected to sail on.
Bad call.
The winds ramped up from trifling to
hurricane force and suddenly the Royal
Charter was struggling to survive, the waves
and wind driving it inexorably towards the
rocks of Anglesey Island. Both anchors were
dropped in an attempt to keep the ship
offshore. The anchor chains snapped. The crew
chopped down the masts to reduce drag and
tried to use the auxiliary engines to get away
from the pounding surf. The ship’s engines
roared and the propellers whirled but inch by
agonizing inch the Royal Charter was
pummelled onto the rocks and utterly
destroyed. Four hundred and fifty souls
perished.
Setting sail in the mid-19th century
was always a crap shoot, no matter the size
or seaworthiness of the vessel. There was
no ‘predicting’ of weather. Indeed, when
a British MP suggested in the House of
Commons that amassing observations of
wind and temperature and other variables
might one day allow citizens to “know the
conditions of the weather 24 hours
beforehand” – he was so thoroughly ridiculed
the House had to adjourn.
Weather prognostication had not progressed
all that much from the days when Ancient
Roman sailors prayed to Jupiter and Inca
priests offered human sacrifices to their rain
god, Tlaloc. ‘Reading the weather’ was a
matter of hunches, aching joints and
superstitions.
The sinking of the Royal Charter changed
all that. Admiral Robert FitzRoy, as chief of
the new Meteorological Office in London
began a system for collecting weather data at
sea. He also instituted a national gale warning
system.
Admiral FitzRoy even had a new word for
all this intelligence – gathering and data
distribution. He called it ‘forecasting’.
How things have changed in 150-odd years.
As I type there is a shiny new four-ton weather
satellite called Himawari 8 looping around our
planet. The Japanese satellite is light years
ahead of current weather satellites, providing
detailed information on hurricanes, forest fires,
lightning, volcanic activity – it even tracks
global pollution. Thanks to technology we
know more about weather to come than we
ever have.
And weather will come – whether we like it
or not. At least we’ve bought some time to
batten down the hatches.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
While I could regale you with all the cuts,
burns and bruises (and the tales they represent)
that resulted from my summer vacation, most
of the memories from it pale to how I felt after
the Maclean’s Magazine leaders’ debate held
last week.
While many people I talk to will know that
television isn’t a big part of my day, I did take
the time during my time off to sit down and
watch the leaders square off.
Maybe square off isn’t the right word for
what transpired, however, as the leaders
seemed more to triangle off.
For those of you who didn’t catch it,
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
Federal Liberal Party Leader Justin Trudeau,
Federal NDP Party Leader Thomas Mulcair
and Federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth
May, over the course of two hours, tackled the
tough questions and very nearly tackled
each other, however the debate was
dominated by three of the four participants
in my opinion.
When I say dominate, however, there is no
positive intonation there.
Harper, Trudeau and Mulcair seemed to be
focused on two things each; the other two in
the triangle.
I had tuned in expecting the preening and
jabs and ready to wade through them to get
some honest-to-goodness answers. I found the
entire debate was heavy on the former and
light on the latter, however.
While I was impressed with Trudeau’s
admitting that his stance on anti-terrorism bill
c-51 may have been naive, the rest of the
debate washed over me as it was filled with
people not answering questions, but arguing
non-stop with their competitors and trying to
discredit them.
It harkened back to a comic I had seen, once
upon a time, where three politicians were
sitting in a boat with a hole. One kept
shovelling out the water while the other two
debated about whose fault it was. Meanwhile,
the boat was surely sinking.
I think the height of the stupidity (and yes, it
was stupid) was when NDP Leader Mulcair
asked Trudeau consistently what his “number”
was for a vote to separate the country.
The issue was in relation to the supreme
court ruling that a single vote was insufficient
to break up a country and Mulcair wanted
Trudeau to give a number as to how many
votes over 50 per cent would be necessary to
allow Quebec to leave the country.
The debate had been brought up when
talking about parliamentary policy and what a
separated Quebec could mean for Canada.
Trudeau pointed out that Mulcair had spoken
about pursuing that.
For at least a solid four to five minutes,
Mulcair prefaced every statement (or simply
made a statement by saying) “What is your
number Justin?”
It was at that time when both Trudeau and
Harper turned on Mulcair, talking about how
the issue doesn’t need to be discussed because
it’s in the past and that a leader should be
focused on uniting and leading a country, not
dividing it.
(To Trudeau’s credit, his answer was
inspired, saying that his number was nine, or
the number of supreme court justices who
agreed that one vote wasn’t enough.)
The entire time, however, I felt cheated.
May, who made several good points
throughout the debate, was cut out of the
discussion and the one political leader who
should have been talking about separation,
Gilles Duceppe of the Bloc Québécois, wasn’t
even invited.
That is just an example of how the debate
went (or how I saw it from my armchair
anyway). It went from Mulcair being
picked on by Harper and Trudeau to
Harper being the focus of Mulcair and
Trudeau’s attacks and, yes, Trudeau eventually
becoming the target of Harper and Mulcair’s
attacks.
Honestly, aside from the fact that Trudeau’s
dramatic pauses could rival those of an
actor who forgot his lines, I don’t recall
much of what the three of them said beyond
“That’s simply not true” or “that’s not the
case”.
To be fair to the leaders, some blame needs
to be placed at the feet of Paul Wells, the
moderator, who allowed much of the debating
and mudslinging to go on before bringing the
discussion back to point.
Despite Wells’ failure to keep the leaders on
topic, the debate did succeed in showing
Canadians the face of the future and it unveiled
a very scary situation to me: Canada is
screwed.
Maybe that’s a bit dark, but the leaders we
have aren’t leaders at all. They aren’t
interested in bettering themselves. They aren’t
interested in bettering the country, all they’re
interested in is being better than the person
next to them so there is always someone to
take the pressure off them.
It is enough to makes me wish that we had a
different electoral system that would allow me
to say that I would vote for one person locally,
but another to lead my country because the
leaders we could have certainly don’t inspire
confidence.
I hope that another debate will be hosted and
that all candidates will agree to it because we
need to see and know more before we cast our
votes. There are too many unanswered
questions, too many stances that weren’t taken
and too much information left to speculation
after this one.
We need a structured debate, one where
answers are kept to the issues at hand and
where no leader is overlooked. We need to
know who our local candidates will be
following before we cast our vote.
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic here,
but Canada has lost much in the past two
federal terms. Whether those losses can be
pinned on the government or whether the
world is just changing, the next several years
are going to be important and the right
leadership needs to be chosen.
To choose the right leadership, however, the
leaders need to address the issues and leave the
defecation-slinging to the primates.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
The time has come
As Central Huron Mayor Jim Ginn said
at last week’s Huron County Council
meeting, it’s time for everyone to share
the road in Huron County.
It is, of course, absurd to suggest that now is
the time for that to happen. Whenever someone
says something like that – that now is the time
for something – it usually means that it’s
become so obvious that the world has reached
a point that it can no longer go without
something. It, in fact, means that the time
actually came a long, long time ago.
On Monday morning I spoke with both Julie
and Theo Sawchuk, whose lives have been, as
Theo says in my story, irrevocably changed by
a lack of sharing the road. And as Julie said to
me and as Bluewater Mayor and avid cyclist
Tyler Hessel said to council that day, sharing
the road isn’t telling one motorist to move over
a little. Sharing the road is a concept. It’s a
movement that needs attention paid to it. It’s a
mutual respect that says one person is no better
than another, simply because one is behind the
wheel of a machine that could kill the other.
Generally speaking, the man in the car, as
dictated by law, has no more right to the road
than the woman on the bike. And yet even still,
the laws seem light and undeterring.
In Julie’s case, she was hit by a motorist
travelling behind her. If that same motorist
does the same thing to a car, trying to pass
without enough room, hitting the car, the
charges are no doubt more severe, and the
injuries, if there are any, are minor.
So while the law has done some to recognize
a cyclist as the vehicle it is on the road, it has
not done enough, although the new one-metre
rule is a start. And, the cycling community has
the tragedies to prove it.
Admittedly, I didn’t always feel this way.
Before I knew the fear of cycling on the open
road, I sat upon my perceived car throne,
looking down at the cyclists wondering what
they were doing on my road. But I have
changed and I understand more from both
sides of the bike, and sharing the road is a
50/50 concept, with learning to be done on
both sides as well.
In Huron County, we don’t have a vast
network of bike trails (even the Goderich-to-
Guelph Rail Trail, when open, will not serve
the needs of many cyclists, who ride road bikes
that require pavement) like many major cities,
we don’t have bike lanes that at least create a
reasonable buffer between car and bike traffic
and we don’t have large (geographically
speaking) cities that one can travel end to end
without getting bored. So here, if you want to
ride, you ride the highway and you assume all
the risk that comes with it.
And while there are no shortage of methods
by which you can make yourself more visible,
there is only so much you can do.
Go into any cycling store and you will find
bright helmets, clothing racks that look like a
pack of Hi-Liters, lights that flash, lights that
don’t flash, bells, horns and everything in
between, but really it’s not about visibility, it’s
about mutual respect and care.
In the end, if a driver doesn’t see a 6’3” man
(me), atop a bike wearing a white helmet, then
I’m not sure any combination of the
aforementioned gadgets is going to help much.
Since I began cycling, I downplayed risk to
family and friends, assuring them I’d be fine
out there. I have since been given pause.
Out on the road, cyclists don’t need to be
viewed as Hi-Liters by motorists, we need to
be viewed as human beings – and treated as
such.
Share the road.
Other Views
Weather… do something about it
Leaders’ debate a revealing event