by James Kimmel

Created on: February 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

Global warming is a beast. I hate global warming.

It's like putting a frog in a pan on the stove, and slowly turning up the heat. Before too long the frog will jump out of the pan or if the frog stays in the pan it will cook. Yuk!

It's like having a trickster turn up the thermostat on you while you're asleep in a comfortable 68 degrees room, you get up to turn the thermostat down, trip over something and bump your head. It hurts.

My heart was broken when I learned that the Monarch Butterfly is disappearing; that wonderful, lovely, delicate creation that enhances the life of anyone fortune enough to behold it.

The combination of human intervention and climate change is bringing about the demise of the monarch butterfly. This natural disaster is described very well in an article by JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. published in the CONTEPEC JOURNAL, March 14, 2005, titled "Chain Saw Thins Flocks of Migrants on Gold Wings".

That's another thing that bugs me about global warming. The combination of human carelessness, ignorance, selfishness, greed, etc. combined with the effects of climate change intensifies the loss caused by global warming.

Global warming has taken on a life of its own. How? I'll describe.

First: Carbon; a foundation for life, retains, or holds onto heat much more than the molecules that make up a clean atmosphere. Carbon began to get pumped into the air surrounding the earth in the 1890's. The discovery and use of the internal combustion engine brought this on. Carbon dioxide that's released into the air generally stays there for about ninety years!

Also, the growing need for electricity which began in the early 1900's, created the need for power plants. Power plants fired by carbon based fossil fuels have delivered countless bazillions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Second: Now that bazillions and bazillions of tons of carbon are un-naturally a part of the atmosphere; when the heat from the Sunlight, strikes the carbon in the air, the carbon in the air olds the heat. That is a basic description of the warming process.

Third: "The beast comes alive!" The warmer air is causing the permafrost to thaw and release methane gas like crazy across Northern Canada, southern parts of Alaska, and southern Siberia. This liberation of carbon, long stored as frozen vegetation under the tundra, puts more tons of carbon in the air than all the emissions from internal combustion emissions worldwide.

Methane gas holds heat something like sixteen times more than the carbon in

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