Date:         Thu, 22 Sep 2005 23:16:16 -0600
Reply-To:     Don Spence <dkspence@TELUS.NET>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Don Spence <dkspence@TELUS.NET>
Subject:      OT Hurricanes--really an accident? A fryeday tale- not
In-Reply-To:  <20050923025241.MNYS9024.priv-edmwes24.telusplanet.net@gerry.vanagon.com>
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Once upon a time, long long ago, this planet was a revolving mass of
gas. Now whether you believe it was divine intervention or natural
processes, the gasses solidified, a planet was born and plant life
appeared and began the arduous task of bringing the atmospheric carbon
dioxide level down to a point where the atmosphere held enough of the
sun's heat to support a biosphere (plants and animals) but not enough
to fry it. Over time, the  biosphere settled into a balance that
supported all the life forms including that late comer, homo sapiens
and his mate hetero sapiens.
The plants did this by capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide in their
cells and then falling down dead on each other. Sometimes they would
fall in the rivers and their bodies would make dams and little pieces
of sand would be trapped and cover them all up. The animals helped too
as they ate the plants, stored the carbon in their bodies and fell down
dead too. The dinosaurs helped a lot because they were so big and ate a
lot of plants. It came to pass that a lot of them fell down dead all
together. Some say it was a natural disaster that made this happen.
Others think the divine interventionist was getting impatient so it
made them all fall down dead together to speed things along. Over tens
of thousands of years (some say millions, some say in six days but then
how long was a day way back then) their bodies rotted and turned into
peat or coal or oil or natural gas that was all buried away so it
couldn't escape back into the atmosphere. This was good for the planet
because now a whole new multitude of organisms could prosper and
multiply. Things like rats and bats, bugs and flies and cockroaches and
bacteria and eventually humans found a place in the forests, streams
mountains and plains on the good earth.

All was good. A balance had been reached. The poles were no longer
covered with tropical forests but had cooled so they captured the extra
water in ice caps and snow fields. This too was good because it created
a nice place for the Clauses to live and a lot of ocean front property
for wealthy people to buy up. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Sometime after the balance was reached it became apparent that
conditions were also good for a human race. So, depending on your point
of view, humans either rose  out of the mud by getting up on their hind
legs or with the assistance of the divine potter and began to multiply.
For awhile this was good too as they did their share of concentrating
the carbon and falling down dead.

But it seems that when they fell down dead, for some bizarre reason
they did so where they lived and they smelled real bad. Particularly
after they were dead.
Now as it happened, these were social creatures. At least during mating
season which for humans was continuous, so the ones who hadn't yet
fallen down dead had a choice. Either move on or do something with the
fallen down dead ones.  For awhile they moved on. Then something
happened and they discovered that instead of running around all over
the place trying to find some plants to eat, you could gather some
seeds and throw them on the ground and they would grow new plants that
you could eat. There was a down side to this of course. Because you had
to wait around for them to grow, you were no longer able to simply walk
away from the fallen down dead. What to do?
It didn't take long for them to figure out that if you covered them
with dirt they didn't smell so bad. So they did that. But that created
another problem. Now you had all these mounds of dirt all over the
place that you were always bumping into, especially at night as they
hadn't discovered streetlights yet. (Or the Divine planner was holding
out on them?)

A new plan was needed!  And so it was that they began the custom of
burying the smelly fallen down dead below grade instead of above grade.
The wiser among them noted that some ground, notably peat bogs, was
easier to dig in than other harder ground. As luck would have it, a
lightning bolt (naturally occurring or intelligently designed?) jumped
down and struck that pile of peat before they could put it back in the
hole and low and behold it caught fire.
This was a good thing if you were a cold smelly human. This was not so
good a thing if you were the atmosphere because the burning of peat was
releasing some of that captured carbon back into the air.  But because
there were not many humans, and they hadn't yet invented the Bic
lighter, it didn't really have much effect. Besides, the planet was
covered with forests and they would just eat it back up for dessert.

As time passed and humans really got into this farming thing, they
found they had to spend less time hunting and gathering and could spend
more time exploring things like the missionary position with the
expected results. ( It's true. I saw it in a movie, "Quest for Fire" )
Now with all the missionarying going on there were more and more humans
which meant, you guessed it, that more and more of them were falling
down dead. This again created a problem because with their primitive
tools it was hard to keep up. Or keep them down under the ground where
they wouldn't smell. Necessity being the mother of invention, they soon
realized it was time to invent the shovel and to make a long long story
shorter, this lead to the tool age.
Now some decided that there just wasn't enough room around these parts
what with all the falling down dead and such so they decided to move
north and south of the best, warm parts of the planet. This was ok in
the summer but hey, whadda ya know, these northern parts have winter.

Now when the missionarying wasn't enough to keep them warm they
remembered fire and peat and how forest wood burned real good too. This
latter discovery lead to the need for the invention of the axe which
lead to the start of the chopping down of the great forests, which was
ok if you were cold or wanted to build a shelter or a boat so you could
sail across the ocean to find more wood because you had burned all
yours up.... But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

Now the stone axe was a good thing but  because they were all hand made
it was hard to get a replacement handle or head that fit properly so it
was time to start the industrial age and invent/create smelting and
forging and blacksmithing and all those other things that you need to
burn coal to do. This lead to the iron age and the need to use those
new shovels to dig up coal. You remember the shovels right? While they
proved to work really well on coal, especially when they started making
them out of iron and then steel. Some of them realized that they could
make a lot of different things out of this new iron and so began the
industrial age and it accelerated at an enormous pace consuming more
and more carbon that the planet and it's biosphere had worked so hard
to put away deep in the earth so things could be in balance. One day
some humans even made a thing that nobody had a use for and that begat
the advertising age.

Now making things that were useful and things that nobody actually
needed hastened the burning of the coal that had been locked away for
centuries and centuries and began to release more of that captured
carbon back into the atmosphere. Some humans began to notice that
things were changing. But just. Mostly they noticed that more and more
of them were falling down dead. Particularly in places like London
where they burned a lot of coal. This created a need for more
mortuaries and crematoriums and bigger and faster hearses. The problem
was that moving from one horse power to two horse power resulted in
more smelly stuff being deposited on the streets. As that was what the
humans were trying to get rid of (smelly stuff like the fallen down
dead people) they developed a need  to invent something that didn't
poop or fall down dead which horses were known to do.

And thus began the auto age aided by the discovery of gooy stuff that
oozed out of the ground and could be burned when you weren't using it
to patch canoes and stuff like that.

Now if you've been paying attention you'll know that this obviously
meant that more and more and more of that carbon that had been secreted
away by the plants so that the biosphere could become a habitable place
for humans and other living things was now being released back into the
atmosphere at an alarming rate.

On Top of that the humans were inventing all sorts of things to feed
the advertising age like aerosol shaving cream and deodorants and FDS
and whipped cream to combat that  smelly business and feed their
fantasies and that they had been real busy playing beaver and chopping
down the forests which when they weren't chopped down were trying real
hard to capture that carbon out of the atmosphere again, and sending
their TV programs, the ones that showed how everyone in one part of the
world wore cowboy hats and drove big expensive cars and lived in
sprawling ranch style house to the parts of the world that lived in
small apartments or on farms and drove bicycles so that the bicycle
drivers wanted to have big shiny cars and trucks too so they could burn
their share of the oil and pump the carbon back into the atmosphere
even faster.

And so it passed that the humans released a lot of the stored carbon
back into the atmosphere and the atmosphere didn't like it and got all
hot under the collar and melted the glaciers faster than old man winter
could make new ones so the rivers dried up and their cities had to be
abandoned and the ice shelves broke up and melted away causing the
oceans to rise and take away all that nice beach front property turning
Atlantic City into Atlantis City.
The atmosphere/divine intervener was not happy that it had to carry the
carbon load again so it seethed mightily and pushed things around a
lot. It spun like a top and created great storms and the storms struck
back at the places where the carbon was being released smashing the
platforms and the refineries, and making a lot of humans fall down dead
as it tried to restore the equilibrium it had worked so hard to create
and maintain. And some of the humans started to think about all this
and they thought oh oh, we better do something. And some others thought
about this and they thought hmmm, it must be the end times. And maybe
they both were right.

On Thursday, September 22, 2005, at 08:43  PM, Automatic digest
processor wrote:

> OT Hurricanes--really an accident?
>