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2 corrections, most recently by yelnod - Show corrections

"LIFE STYLE

> 1 TALKING POINT^

Disappearance revives long-standing fears

Cabbies troubled by lack of protection

From ROHAN RIVETT, in Melbourne

TyiELBOURNE'S cab

drivers arc deeply

concerned about the lack

of safety in their job. The disappearance of 24 ycar-okl I.en Davis near a Mordialloc canal in the small hours of Sun day morning has revived long-standing fears.

About three years ago two Melbourne taxi drivers were found murdered in a short space of lime. The total money accruing to their attackers was only $36. Since then, drivers contend, noth ing has been done by taxi companies or other authori ties to protect drivers from night attack.

"Yon are absolutely at your passenger's mercy", one driver told me this week.

"l-tc can direct you any where he likes. He calls the lune. You may not know the district at all. He may know it (horoughly — the hotis-r-s the lighting, the chances oi anybody being about".

Cynical

Apparently there are alarm devices in some Melbourne taxis. Drivers are cynical nbout the effect they would produce at a depot. Then there is the problem of ex actly where the driver has got to since he last callcd in.

Finally, even if police mo bile patrols are alerted quick ly, the chnnccs are that the damage is done and the attacker is well away from where the crime took place before they can arrive on the

scene.

; The current concern of taxi drivers will not dis appear even if Mr Davis, in

spite of the apparent odds, turns up alive. They believe that "cabbie-bashing" goes in cycles. " ,

On' Sunday. 7] hours

elapsed between the time Mr Davis's radio base last con tacted him and the time-when his taxi was found by a drain with Blood on the scat, his glasses broken and his empty wallet and wedding ring nearby.

Although there are ccrtain unexplained features of the Davis case which arc worry ing police, who have not yet lost hope that he may still be alive, the vulnerability of taxi men at night is now under renewed review.

Some drivers have urged that a radar-operated camera such as is installed oil bank and ' totalisator premises should become standard equipment in taxis;

Question

l.caving aside the cost problems, the question is would they actually deter the criminals today when cam era-equipped banks continue to be raided.

One experienced driver be lieves that nightwork should only be done in cabs where the driver is completely parti

lioned off from the passen gers. He believes lhat in such cabs no passengers will be able to travel in the front seat thus reducing capacity from four or five passengers to three all in.thc back.

"I believe they have it in London", he said.

"The driver' cannot lie interfered with or spoken lr> by the passengers unless he himself makes commu nications possible. There is no reason why his cabin should not be protected with bulletproof glass".

Al present it is all too easy for any passenger to cut the driver off from commu nication with his radio base. He merely has to lean for ward and rip out the in

suluted wire which hangs dowif from the dashboard in most cabs.

Drivers admit ihcy have not yet devised a_ safely scheme to protect the cabbie at the end of the journey when money is' being ex changed.

Intuitive

They say, however, that years of experience give the driver an intuitive feeling when there may be trouble ahead. He will be particularly suspicious if asked to stop in some lonely,' unfrequented

area.

Some Victorian cubbies be lieve they would be safer if I he law allowed each driver

to carry a gun. However, (he' word would soon get nround among potential criminals who would take good carc to see the driver had no oppor tunity of using it before he was struck down.

Al the moment, new moves for driver protection arc awaiting solution of the fate of Mr Davis. But. some hun dreds of families whose breadwinner drives a cab at night arc intensely worried in

Melbourne now, and the is-; sue o£ new safety deviccs is certain to be pressed on all taxi companies in the near

future.

SUPPORT FOR THEORY OF A COOLING WORLD

NEW YORK, Wednes-

day (AAP). — Wea-        

ther satellites sweeping across the northern hemi- sphere have come up with a surprise: the per- manent snow and ice

cap has increased sharply, Associated Press reported.

The finding is cited as one more indication of what some climatologists believe to be a basic change in the world's climate, a cooling

trend.

The trend could affect weather and rainfall patterns, perhaps imparing the world's ability to produce enough food for the expanding popu- lation, according to a number of authorities.

Study of weekly maps of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the snow and ice increased by 12% in the northern hemisphere in 1971 and has remained at the new level.

The study was done by George and Helen Kukla, of

the Lamondoherty Geological Observatory, Colombia University. Their research did not determine the reason for the sudden increase in

the permanent snow and ice

cap.

The Kukla's study arrived at the 12% figure by deter- mining that snow and ice now is found year-round in the coastal mountains of British Columbia, and in various Asian mountain rain-

ges, the Himalayas, Tien- Shan, Hindu Kush.

Duration

The location and duration of snow and pack-ice fields constituted the most impor- tant seasonal variable in the earth's heat balance, the two scientists wrote in Science, journal of the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science.

The Kukla report is cited by Dr F. Kenneth Hare, of the University of Toronto, a leading climatologist, who says the big ice expansion preceded the coldest Can- adian winter yet recorded.

In the winter of 1972, Dr Hare said in an interview,

temperatures were below nor- mal for the entire year over the entire country. This had never happened before.

For the north-eastern third of the country, Dr Hare said, it was the coldest year on record, in many places cold- est by a wide margin. In many areas, he continued, there were as many as 19 consecutive months of below normal temperatures.

The earliest serious records began in 1840, Dr Hare noted. So for 130 years there has not been anything like it.

"I don't know what caused this", he said.

"But the climate has in fact shifted into a more ex- treme phase".

In the United States, the leading proponent of the changing-climate theory is Mr Reid Bryson, director of

the Institute for Environmen- tal Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

The evidence was now

abundantly clear, that the cli- mate of the earth was chang- ing, and was changing in a direction that was not promising in terms of our ability to feed the world, he

said.

The fear was that the cli- mate changes were acting to push the sub-tropical deserts of North Africa and Asia southward.

Last year, Mr Bryson noted, was the sixth con- secutive year of drought in Kenya, Ethiopia and the sub- Saharan countries of Mau- ritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan — all just above the equator.

The year before, he says, there was drought in Russia, Central America, Southern Asia, perhaps China,

Mr Elmore Jackson, who is in charge of a program on conflicts in international rela- tions for the Rockefeller Foundation, warns of basing projections on what seems to be an unstable base.

Uncertainty

"This introduces an ele- ment of uncertainty in pre- dictions and undermines some of the confidence of people who made agricultural predictions", he said. "There is much more uncertainty now than in the past that we can rely on stable patterns of

weather so we have to look more fully at the question of

food reserves".

Mr Bryson believes much of the change is man-made. While many climatotogists agreed there is a climate change, not all subscribe to his explanation.

At the beginning of this century, Mr Bryson says, temperatures were rising ra- pidly. The dome of cool air which covered the polar re- gions was contracting and by  

1940 had reached rather small size, and more of the earth was dominated by warm tropical and subtropic- al conditions.

But since then, something had happened to make the earth cooler and the polar whirl of cool air larger.

There were three factors — volcanic dust, man-made par- ticulate matter and carbon di- oxide — affecting the ab- sorption of sunlight and therefore the temperature of the atmosphere, he said.

These three elements, in a complex series of inter- actions, combined to deter- mine patterns of atmospheric circulation and rainfall. The amount of all three in the atmosphere was increasing.

The monsoon lands of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and China, were regions that were dry in winter and re- ceive their rainfall in the summer. North of those re- gions, subtropical high- pressure areas produced the deserts of North Africa and Asia. If these deserts moved southward, the monsoons were suppressed. Arctic cooling pushed the desert cli-

mates southward.

In India, he says, the mon- soon is more complex but the trend still seems to be a re- turn to a higher frequency of drought. In the early part of the century thre were droughts every three or four years. As the earth warmed, monsoon rains declined to about once every 18 years.

In the past few years, with the cooling of the earth and the southward movement of the subtropical high-pressure areas, drought frequency had been increasing in India.

If droughts returned to India with a frequency like that which prevailed at the turn of the century, but with a population swollen four fold, the human and political consequences would be

enormous.

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