That's Scary
Krayton Kerns
9.17.07
When I was a kid I learned a valuable lesson about the pitfalls of scaring people. We lived in a haunted house on the family homestead and my two bothers and I did our best to avoid the spirits who lived there. The story starts innocently enough.
Through casual conversation I discovered my eight year-old brother Blaine would never use the upstairs bathroom without first jerking open the dark rubber shower curtain that concealed the bathtub. After all, you wouldn’t want to be caught on the toilet reading National Geographic if a ghost jumped out of the tub. “Wouldn’t it be great,” I thought to myself, “If I just happened to be standing behind the curtain when he jerked it open?”
A few days passed before I sprung my plan. At bedtime I said goodnight, sprinted up the stairs and slipped behind the shower curtain. It was only minutes, but it seemed like hours as I stood alone in the tub and softly giggled at my devious scheme. I heard Mom and Blaine visiting as they walked up the stairs towards bed. I waited. The lights clicked on, the bathroom door shut and the faucet began running. I waited still. Confused as to why Blaine hadn’t jerked the curtain open, I could stand it no longer. Without thinking I jumped out of the tub and yelled, “Arrrrrrrrrgh!” It was then I realized my mistake.
When Mom let loose of the ceiling light she was as mad as I had ever seen her. For several minutes the room looked like a Border collie chasing a jackrabbit through a tack shed. I was on the counter, off the counter, over the toilet, up the towel rack, across the ceiling, in the tub, out of the tub, and back on the counter. At every step Mom was screaming and beating me with anything she could grab that was harder than a ten year-old boy.
On my third pass by the door I opened the latch and the ruckus ruptured out into the hallway. Finally exhausted, Mom quit the chase and began lecturing about the evils of scaring people. Dragging myself to my feet, I listened intently all the time I watched Blaine giggling from his bedroom doorway.
Later that evening and once safely in bed, I started thinking; I am so glad when I jumped out from behind the curtain Mom was just brushing her teeth and was not sitting on the toilet. I am not sure she could have died from a bladder spasm but I know I would have required counseling well into my thirties. Thus, I learned a valuable lesson about the evils of scaring people, and this brings me to my point:
The socialist left is hiding behind the shower curtain in an attempt to scare folks into thinking that global warming is caused by using too much toilet paper, Ford trucks pulling horse trailers, and belching cows. That is absurd.
Carbon dioxide, the left’s evil greenhouse gas, represents less than 0.4% of the gas in our atmosphere. Of the 186 million tons of carbon dioxide produced annually by the earth, 90 million tons comes from biological activity in the oceans, and 90 million tons comes from volcanoes. That leaves 6 million tons from all other sources including man’s activities on this earth. We have no more the capacity to heat the earth, than we do the capacity to cool it. It can’t be done.
Look at it this way: Take a stock tank and fill it with 100 gallons of water. That represents our atmosphere. To that tank add 49.6 fluid ounces of red dye. (That’s just over four pop cans.) This represents the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere over which we have no control. Intently study how red the water appears. Now add 1.6 more fluid ounces of red dye; that’s about a shot glass full. This is an amount several times higher than the level of carbon dioxide man is capable of adding to our atmosphere. Notice any change? The answer is no.
Granted, your eye is not a spectrophotometer capable of measuring miniscule changes in the amount of red dye in a stock tank. However, for you to be a follower of the man-caused global warming religion you must accept the theory that such an infinitesimally small change in atmospheric carbon dioxide can have catastrophic changes to our temperatures when it cannot.
Today the Highwood Generation Plant in Great Falls has been effectively shut down due to the cost and complexity of carbon sequestrating requirements dictated by the fear-mongering environmentalists in the 60th legislature. Because of these restrictions we won’t be generating reliable electricity for Montanans, mining Montana coal and creating Montana jobs. Yet, the Governor still claims “Montana is open for business.” How is that possible?
