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Gas Scare

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Take a deep breath. There’s more carbon dioxide in our air than ever before. Enjoy!

The colorless, odorless, heat-trapping gas was tracked in samples taken at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory to be over the 400 parts per million level for an entire day – a dreaded milestone passed in an increasingly rapid march towards melting polar ice, higher ocean levels, and global climate change. Much of it is traceable to our compulsion to free carbon from storage and burn it for our own prosperity and enjoyment.

Here’s a song about it from New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin.

Despite the songs and charts that try to call attention to it, climate change does not seem to capture the popular imagination as easily as space alien invasion, random street crime, gender identity confusion and the government taking guns away from law abiding citizens. This is inexcusable in a country that is so skilled at scaring itself.

I went to see Hitchcock’s The Birds at a movie theater last week.

Now there was a guy who knew how to sound an alarm. If we were able to perceive the increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere in the same way Tippi Hedren saw the accumulation of crows on that jungle gym, maybe we could drum up a little more urgency on the issue.

What scares you?

78 thoughts on “Gas Scare”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Some days, life itself scares me. Otherwise, scary movies freak me out, so I don’t watch them. Tornadoes scare me after having witnessed too many Great Plains Tornadoes in my childhood. Lately the crazy news stories scare me. So I will give up the news, too.

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  2. Good morning. Don’t get me started. My problem is not so much what scares me, as it is what to do about it. I was very happy about the occupy movement. I wish they had been able to sustain and increase their activities. I think at least some of the people from that movement are remaining active. As Dale indicated, big scary issues, like global warming, don’t seem to get enough attention.

    You can hear some good discussions about what to do about scary issues on the public affairs programing from 9 to 10 on week day mornings on KFAI. The people who do those public affairs shows are not as good a dramatizing thing as Alfred Hitchcock. However, they are very good at presenting programs on important issues.

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  4. Outliving my child scares me. Not being able to save for retirement adequately scares me (heck, it scares me that we could still be paying of Husband’s student loan debt in retirement). Standing on an A-frame ladder any taller than 10 feet scares me (and extension ladders give me the willies regardless of the height). What global climate change will do to alter the world my grandchildren (hopefully I will have a grandchild or two in another 20+ years) will grow up in frightens me to no end. Today I am merely a bit worried that I will look lumpy in places I ought not to in the dress I purchased to wear to a friend’s wedding this afternoon…(lumpy or no, I will wear it gladly – and am looking forward to wearing it again next weekend where hopefully we will celebrate not only a wedding but also the passage of the marriage equality bill ensuring that the two brides can be legally married as well as spiritually so).

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    1. You need to be afraid of not doing something to make it better. There are one hundred ways toile a move in a positive direction and only one way to do nothing

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  6. My biggest fear right now is mouse droppings. We have had mice in our garage, one in our van which seems to have vamoosed, and now I think daughter has a mouse in her car. We have set out traps and dryer sheets. Last weekend I cleaned the garage, and breathed in clouds of dust from sweeping and found lots of mouse droppings in a tub we stored drop cloths in. I tossed the lot, but worry about getting Hanta Virus from the dust and drop cloths.. A friend of mine lost a son to it a couple of years ago. I just found some random wild rice kernels in the kitchen cupboard and needed some reassurance from husband it was really rice and not from mousies.

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    1. i alive by the river and have mouse issues every year. i dont think you can plug the house. i set traps and hate emptying them every day but otherwise we have wild rice that isnt wild rice in abundance in our olive oil bin under the stove. the garage where i sstore flour and rice is an issue and the panrty with the noodles and beans is home to moths and varmints. im not smart enough to be concerned. i just chew with my teeth closed to keep out the big chunks

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        1. In that case go get 3 cats and let them live in the garage. Cats don’t care if you never speak to them again and they will make sure mice are a thing of the past

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  7. scary things are good at motovating a response. going along everyday and dealing with the scary stuff you run into is a great exercise. my fears are that china and their population of polluters will have that half of the wporld so messed up the rest of us will deal with the left overs of their abuse. their are a billion of them , they all want cars and a place to live with running water that goes straight into the river into the gulf into the ocean. the chinese government dose try to clean up and makes sure the headlines about 600,000 here and a billion there create a sense of caring. they just know they need some good pr. they dont care at all and the culture over there makes the iron range look like socialites and aristocrats. the same hotel room on the 25th floor that used to have air pollution so i could only see a mile or so today has a visibility of maybe across the street and if you are lucky the ground. it is unbelievable. they built freeways and planted a jillion trees next to the freeway not to create oxygen but to create an outside impression of caring.
    the rain forest, indonesia africa. the world is so concerned about not starving to death they dont think about stewardship of the earth.
    i am scared about the upcoming generation and their brains that dont know how to finish a sentance without responding to a facebook buddy midsentance. the imagination and daydream void is going to be real obvious when the problem solving comes from x box logic instead of abstract reasoning and personal interaction.
    nutrition and the way garbage is the standard offering in america today. you would think it would be understood that crap out of a frozen food box has marginal likelyhood at being of any nutritional merit whatsoever. how can we be great eating cheetos and granola bars?
    the financial cliff is a scary big brother. i would like to implement a retirement community where it is a coop kind of deal with singles and couples of the over 40 or 50 age can take a room and enjoy the community of folks rather than a singles apartment or retirement in an old folks home. city group , country group, suburbs white bread folks need others to discuss their areas of interest. (what would those be?)
    my hands just started going south and i feel for clyde and would hate and fear living a life with out all the tools to enjoy it. like my old twighlight episode with the guy who want to read

    http://vimeo.com/39941330

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    1. It would be unfortunate to end up like that guy in that episode, tim. In the new version of that story he would find the last remaining iPad and would drop that and break it along with his glasses just as he was about access one of his favorite books.

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  8. Thanks for the birthday greetings yesterday!
    I did some farm stuff in the morning, saw three opera singers doing songs by Richard Wagner over the noon hour (Rochester Music Guild sponsored a ‘Lunch and Learn’ program) and then spent the afternoon and evening lighting a dance show at the college.
    A busy, diverse, full, good day.
    Sickness scares me- Sickness to my wife or kids scares me.

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  9. Blindness scares me – and it’s not the “not seeing my loved ones faces” (though that’s bad enough), it’s losing color. My husband is convinced I see colors other people don’t – that may be training or it may be something Husband read about that leads him to believe I have an extra color cone hanging out in my eyeballs. But not seeing all the different greens in the grass as it starts to grow in the spring, or the myriad blues in the sky or the rich browns and golds of my daughter’s eyes…I would have a hard time with that.

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    1. Blindness here too, Anna. Forgot about that with my original reply to the question. I’m confident I can survive and negotiate the world with the loss of any other sense–although not being able to listen to great jazz or classical or Eva Cassidy would be a bummer–but not being able to see?? No thanks. It would make me too dependent on others for handling daily life. I marvel at any blind person who is out, about and successfully navigating in modern society.

      Chris in Owatonna

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  10. I can’t even click on The Birds’ link… I saw it once as a child and it scared the willies out of me… have never seen it since. I don’t go see scary movies at all any more; I don’t even like to see the commercials for scary movies.

    All the other things mentioned already scare me. Not sure I want a list this long!

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    1. I saw just a part of The Birds movie when I was a kid and I still remember that feeling of terror I had (pretty sure I didn’t watch the whole thing, the glimpse I had was more than enough).

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      1. in north dakota where the number one activity is hunting ducks geese and pheasants?
        i saw an interview with alfred i think it was with dick cavett where he talked about all this and it became appearant what a master he was at understanding the power of suggestion and the camera. i like his way of suggesting things that get to your subconscious vs the blood and slime in the gory slasher flicks. sounds like baboon slasher flick night would be a gas. night of the living dead, texas chainsaw massacre halloween freddie. all very different from alfred and his making you fill in the details in your brain.

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        3. No, it is robins and grackles and sparrows who frighten me. They swoop and dive and peck. Ducks and geese and pheasants are not scary at all. They just search for gravel on the side of the road or nest in prairie potholes.

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        4. swallows ar ehte ones that come after you. they build those mud huts on top of ight fixtures and under eaves and then dive bomb you to let you know you are in their territory. it can be very intimidating. like tiny flying robuts on steroids

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        5. tim, my schedule is erratic and subject to sudden changes. So I think it best if you schedule a scary movie night for what works best for you and I will let you know if I can come or not.

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        6. I’ve been dive bombed by a blue jay once. Unbeknownst to me, I had wandered too close to its nest, and it wasn’t pleased. It literally touched the hair on my head with its feet, that’s how close it came, several times. Got out of there in a hurry.

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        7. I’ll be thinking of you all on baboon slasher movie night, but I won’t be able to make it. Edith and I will go off and do something else while we protect our sanity!

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  11. What scares me? So many things I can’t list them. Maybe I will do a Top 10 List later, but I think I’ll go take a nap now.

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  12. Before I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, I was so scared of cancer that I avoided the topic completely. Both of my parents died from cancer at age 72. Whole chapters in my women’s health books were routinely skipped because I didn’t want to know anything about that dreaded disease. Once I was diagnosed, I couldn’t learn fast enough about my particular kind of cancer (stage 3, adenosquamous carcinoma of the endometrium), it’s treatment and possible side effects of those treatments. Becoming my own best advocate by knowing as much about it as I could, and declining treatments I knew had the most severe side effects somehow made dealing with the disease easier. Having survived this long, I consider every day a gift.

    Having several friends in various stages of dementia, I worry that dementia will overtake me as well. One of these friends is six years younger than me, one just two years older, and one is 91. For some reason I’m having a particularly hard time remembering names, and I sometimes worry that this is the beginning of a slow decline in mental acuity over which I’ll have no control. It’s a scary thing when something goes wrong in your brain. I can only imagine how Cb must be feeling right now, knowing that there are things going on in her brain over which she has no control. Unlike with the cancer, I’m concerned that whatever I learn will be quickly forgotten, and from what I know now, it’s not likely to make much difference anyway. Perhaps dementia is worse for those surrounding the afflicted than it is for the person with it? It’s not a topic I dwell on a lot, but the prospect of Alzheimer’s is scary indeed.

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    1. agreed. sadly i heard about a mental excersice that helps alot and i meant to plug it in to my regiment but i forgot what it was and where i heard it. damn

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    2. My dad had dementia. I think it what was most frustrating for him was when the words he needed to express something evaded him or he couldn’t make the right connection to let us know what he needed to say. Losing his place in time, not so distressing – forgetting he had played a piece on the piano 3 times in the last half hour, no biggie. Not being able to quite say exactly what was bothering him?…oy. That was just starting to happen more frequently before he died. Hard to watch someone unravel in the way that dementia takes a person.

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      1. One of my female friends had her long-time partner die from early onset Alzheimer’s. She told me the diagnosis was tough for both of them, but as the disease progressed, the partner seemed completely oblivious and lived in a different world. She grieved for years as the disease took it’s toll while her partner went off on a completely different track, unable to recognize her or anyone else, essentially lost to all of them.

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  13. Greetings! All things mentioned above. Other things that really scare me are people who are stupid and/or ignorant and small-minded. They usually have a hard time seeing the big picture of all those things mentioned above. Have a great day everyone — and Happy Mother’s Day!

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  14. My answer to today’s question is just too obvious: my brain scares me. Never did before – matter of fact, I was quite confident in its ability to navigate the complexities of this life. After yesterday’s diagnosis, I no longer trust this most important of all organs or take for granted that it’s functioning properly. On a list of 30 symptoms of “complex partial seizures” I read today, only ONE fit me: occasional difficulty talking. Last summer, there were 3-4 times while on the phone that I was quite aware that it was an effort to form and speak words. My kid asked if I’d been drinking even (I hadn’t). Other than this, the other 29 symptoms are foreign to me.

    Imagine being told that you’ve had 30 seizures during a day that was highly and full functional? I didn’t skip a beat that day as a therapist or a friend. I’m now left with feeling like a walking time bomb ready to explode in a nano second. Not very reassuring for sure. As with every other major challenge I’ve faced, I’ll adjust to this as well. Not quite yet, though.

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    1. just weird cb. to be going along doing fine and find out you were all screwed up is mind boggling. it will be interesting to see what you feel when the changes are plugged into your every day life. scary too. peace.

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  15. I know I said this yesterday, but I truly believe you will feel better and be less frightened when the medication kicks in.

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    1. I hope so, Renee. The listed side effects of this drug concern me greatly, though. I feel like I’m trading something entirely invisible (hidden seizures) for something which will manifest overtly.

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      1. Just remember, you were having 30 seizures, and didn’t even feel it. You only had one grand mal. Your brain is amazing. We are talking about electrical impulses. We just need to adjust the voltage.

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        2. The way you put it makes my brain seem amazingly resilient and self-correcting. Thank you – I’d never have thought of it this way!

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        3. Minnesota is really good place to be if you have seizures, because of all the wonderful medical resources you have there. We send all our tricky seizure cases there.

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  16. we found renees area cb. it is good to know what she knows about this sort of thing. i think she is the only friend i have would trust to look after my brain seizures but not my soup spoons.

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    1. I love brains. They are wonderful and really are self correcting. If it would have worked with my family I would have gone on for a post-doc in neuropsychology. That would have required two more years away from home after I got my PHD. All of us have a threshold for seizures depending on health and body chemicals. The modern medicines for seizures have revolutionized the lives of persons with seizure disorders. It was pretty grim before the 1950’s.

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      1. i am elated that you know that. cb you can feel better and we can arrange renee as a contact for all seizure related stuff. she is your new best friend.
        renee isnt it amazing how two years seems like an insurmountable obstacle to going into an area you really would have loved. and today two years is gone in a blink of an eye.

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        1. What??? Renee’s knowledgeable about brains and seizures??? I had no idea. Renee, please do let me know how to have email contact with you. I could spend days surfing the internet for information that one contact/ call with you might provide.

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        2. Glad I could be of help. There is really nothing like a good chat with your neurologist for the straight scoop, but I would be glad to try to answer any questions that I could. How do I let you know my email address without posting it for non-baboons to see?

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        3. When I had already been hundreds of miles away for a whole year from husband and 5 year old son, two years did seem insurmountable.

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  17. I saw The Birds years ago and I didn’t find it too scary. There are some scenes in films that do scare me. I nearly fainted when I viewed a scene where a person in a film started to use a sharp piece of glass to do harm to herself.

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  19. More scary things:
    – idiots texting while they’re driving toward or beside me
    – having two dozen people in this little house for Thanksgiving (luckily, we don’t do that anymore)
    – idiots with loaded guns marching on Washington – the idea, even if it doesn’t happen
    – loaded guns
    – sudden, major changes… I want all changes from now on to be gradual (I think; that may fall into the “watch what you ask for” category)

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  20. Happy Mother’s Day to all baboon moms and the moms of all the baboons! Off topic but good for a giggle-We attended the senior banquet with daughter on Friday, and she was voted “Most Oscar- worthy” and “most likely to trip at graduation” by her classmates. She was elated.

    On topic-we are planning a graduation party for daughter in August in Colorado with all her dad’s relatives. Some live in Colorado and some live in Portland OR and Mpls. My husband’s nephew is 14 and diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He is often manic. He is so excited about the prospect of a graduation party and a simultaneous family reunion that he has started to plan our gathering, and sent me a page long list of suggestions for decorations (photo montage of daughter’s life; recordings of all the music she has played and sang), menus (quiches or crepes with strawberries), activities, and other ways to honor daughter. He told me that he can cook, decorate, and sing. I am happy he is so happy, but I am a little frightened at how I am going to channel his enthusiasm and energy. Daughter was aghast at his plans and said “Mom, he used the word “montage”! Doesn’t he know we are just simple people?”

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    2. Your daughter and mine sound similar. We are having her graduation party and I’m having to rein in my party-planning/decorating genes. She has informed me along the way that we don’t need to decorate the plates, she doesn’t want a margarita/slushy machine and I am only allowed to get a dozen balloons.. no more. She has relented and is letting me decorate the cakes (only when she found out Costco won’t agree to follow her very specific directions). She also is allowing me to make sugar cookies in the shape of anchors (school logo) as long as I make “regular cookies” as well!

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  21. Happy Mothers’ Day to you all, whether you are “mom” to human(s), cats, dogs, bunnies, goldfish… I will probably get calls today from step-son and nephew-son. We just had breakfast at Gigi’s Cafe in S. Mpls. (mentioned a couple of days ago) with nephew-son’s mom. Life is good.

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    1. I would recommend not putting your email in as you regularly would – but spell it out and put in spaces (as in “crystalbay at something dot com”). Putting in a “straight” email address on a blog like this can get picked up and used for spam…

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  24. Shaking me up even more about this seizure disorder thing is learning of not one, but two recent telephone conversations for which I have no recall whatsoever. I plan to book a consult at Mayo Clinic tomorrow morning, have them review all my tests, and get a second opinion about all of this.

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    1. Go for it, Cb, get the most expert help you can. About posting your email here, don’t forget that baboons may not be the only ones taking notice. I’m sure Dale will be glad to connect you.

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    2. CB, let me know when / if you’re in town; I’ll buy you lunch or something. And you can come see the farm if you’re interested.

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    1. love that one. thanks for another jewel
      gordon bok and the dalai lama have the same voice
      i first heard this done by the clancy brothers

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