Hard data belongs to the realm of the physical sciences. All

other data concerning people is social data and not very rigorous to
say the

least.

It's rather more rigorous than trawling the internet for reports
of accidents, which is what you do :-).

If the reports are numerous enough and sufficiently
widespread, any intelligent person will detect a pattern and draw some
conclusions. The reason you are unable to perform these quite simple functions
is because you are not intelligent.

Funnily enough, this would be true IF the reports were numerous and widespread enough. However, they're not. Against the millions of rides occurring every day they are tiny and therefore statistically insignificant.

I am not going to claim any great intelligence but, if you want to achieve any at all I suggest you read the following ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Specifically, read the paragraph which starts "Experiments have found repeatedly that people tend to test hypotheses in a one-sided way, by searching for evidence consistent with their current hypothesis."

The Mountain Rescue report details every incident where they were
called out ... that's a representative sample for a season in one
location.

Yes, but only for that one location. Not general
enough.

Oh do learn some statistics and analysis. You want to collect data from the whole world without considering its size and then, magically, apply it to one location to make decisions. The Lake District data is comprehensive .... for one location ... so can be used ... for that location. Your worldwide data is meaningless.

"Your reports" are no such thing ... they're random articles
culled from the media all over the world.* They are almost entirely
worthless since you don't have enough data from any one location to infer
anything.

The fact that they are random and from all over the world is
what makes them so good. It is your data from one location that is
worthless.

Oh do go and read a textbook .. you're looking very foolish