Methane clathrates contain about as much carbon as
all the fossil fuels. They lie real quietly along the
continental shelves. Nobody knows how they got there,
but I would look for a cometary origin, ignoring for
the moment the narrowness of impact energies required
to trap subliming methane ice in a refreezing matrix of water ice. I'd look for a cometary origin first just
because comets are made of the same stuff, methane and
water ice, as our geological feature the methane clathrates.

We didn't know these were there in Watt's day, nor
in Adam Smith's day. We didn't know we would have trouble
with the carbon burden in our atmosphere. We can't
retroactively condemn the way we developed our technology.
Humans have always burned fires. That and killing animals
are the two things we're really good at. Breeding too, for
three things we're really good at. We're not good at
making our economic nor legal structures robust enough
to deal with economically invisible things like methane
clathrates. Nor even the carbon burden of the atmosphere,
nor making forests become deserts, because the economy
cannot evaluate these things, and asks
"So what's the problem?"

Does gigatons of volatile carbon trapped under shallow
seas make you want to be careful about what happens to
your weather patterns, when you're into a steep warming
trend and this gas is locked up in ice? Look for questions
that may be on the quiz.

The real problem lies deeper, all the way down. Most of
this planet's carbon is in deep freeze, in the abyss, in
carbonate sediments, where nothing more need be said if
it doesn't get any carbonated water nor sulfur. Were it
all gasified, it would produce fifteen atmospheres of CO2.
That'll pop your ears. (The abyssal freezing currents are
driven by zonal sinks of polar water. This sinking might
be interrupted by iceburg presence in the five critical
zones, allowing exposure of the sediments to excess
carbonic acid in other water layers, thus sourcing CO2 to the water in a positive feedback loop, without biological
mediation.) We currently have the problem with iceburgs.

We may not trip these traps, because it's not funny any
more. We wouldn't survive them. Nature has given us a very
rude wake-up call. If we can stop burning fossil fuels and
most wood, and do this rather abruptly, and plant forests
in the deserts, we might live to grow up through the coming
century. Otherwise not. If the economy is what it costs us
to stay alive, that's what we will have to pay.

( I posted the above into a death penalty newsgroup, where
legalistic fascists were giving me their predictable static about Millenial Amnesty (which I might start calling Day of

In article <75le91$v0k$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
jthunderbird@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> In article <75jl5v$icm$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>,
> jthunderbird@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> > What is to be done? Millenial Amnesty
> >
> > Let us resolve as follows:
> >
> > Resolved, all prisoners, captives and restrained persons are
> > due liberty as of the first day of January of the year 2001 > > of the common era,
> >
> > and further Resolved,
> >
> > that on that date all debts of private parties be forgiven,
> > rescinded and expunged so no individual will enter the new
> > millenium owing anything.
>
> Millenial Amnesty Planning Board
> http://www.InsideTheWeb.com/mbs.cgi/mb275670 > http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/millenialamnesty
> http://www.dejanews.com/~millenialamnesty/group/dejanews.comm.millenialamnesty
> heavyLight Free! Books Online http://fly.to/heavyLight
>
> It is wrong to suppose that universal amnesty is without precedent.
> The first codified laws, the Code of Hammurabi, are from the
> Babylonian civilization, but Babylon was only a continuation of the
> earlier Sumerian culture. These were Iraqis.
>
> Sumerian and Babylonian societies shared the tradition,
> when a new reign began, that all prisoners
> would be freed and all debts forgiven.
> They were able to keep their bread baking and
> their beer flowing in spite of their shocking
> generosity to the underclasses on these occasions.
>
> New reigns happen, on the average, every decade or two.
> Quite possibly, our society could survive
> relaxing repression once every millenium or so.
>
> What if that's not so?
>
> If our civilization is fragile enough, that it would be destroyed
> by one day without captives and debtors, what would you call that?
>
> I would say it means our civilization is too evil to continue.
> Does that provoke you to any response?
>
> Johnny Thunderbird

Fear Not Babylon

Don't tremble for the chariots of Tilgeth-Pilesar.
Fret not the massed armies of Nebuchadnezar.
Babylon the mighty is fallen, is fallen.
The cities of Sumer are all laid in ruins,
and Akkad is a desolation.
Babylon that great city has been laid waste.

Mesopotamia, cradle of our civilization, where
we learned writing, the Zodiac, law and taxes,
will never more threaten to invade your slumber.
That green idyllic land between the Tigris and
Euphrates, where dwelt the Garden of Eden, anchor
of the Fertile Crescent, is no more. That legendary
soil grew its last crops before Richard the Lion
Hearted was ransomed.

After seven millenia of agriculture, the first
three with the benign deposition of silt by gentle
floods, then the next four millenia with organized
irrigation from canals and ditches, the storied
land of Mesopotamia was given up by the last farmers
in the twelfth century of our era. All that extensive
irrigation left the land too salty to grow plants.
It's desert. (It gets bombed every few years.)

That brings to mind the story of the Mediterranean.
When the tender roots of our literate civilization
were first being watered in Sumer, the Mediterranean
was totally surrounded by forested lands. It took us
some time, but we cut every one of those trees down.
Now that sea is surrounded by deserts, for all
practical purposes. Green is a color rarely seen on
those shores. Rainfall patterns are not to blame, but
woodcutters.

These ecological object lessons bring us around to
the subject of today's lesson. Industrial civilization
burns fossil fuel. Now it turns out we need to stop
doing that, all at once, completely, and for sure. The
world is in danger from this activity of ours, which
has become such a habit with us. The risk is incremental
with delay time, for threshhold effects are involved
which could switch our weather cycles into chaotic modes.
If that doesn't bother you, it means you don't understand
the phrasing. If you don't think it concerns you, it
means you live in an imaginary world. This one's in
trouble.
( I posted this to a death penalty newsgroup, where I was
getting their predictable static about Millenial Amnesty
(which I might start calling Day of
Freedom). I thought it might be of interest here too. To help
those cognitively handicapped respondents understand which
way is up, I added a couple lines about hippies:
)

When we as hippies excused ourselves from
your society some thirty years back, we said we had more
important things to think about. We weren't kidding. Here
we are, we thought about it, and we aren't kidding now.

Welcome to the real world.

.......
Writing for this NG, I wouldn't have taken such a grumpy tone.
That's because here, I feel like I'm among my own people.
Sure, it's heavy stuff, heavy as it gets.
The good news is, we get to kick out the fascists.
Then we'll have to work like never before, to set this
planet right so that

life goes on,
Johnny Thunderbird
heavyLight Books http://fly.to/heavyLight
Greenhouse Catastrophe as Revolutionary Imperative
http://www.oocities.org/~jthunderbird/green.html

What is to be Done? Io Babylon! alt.gathering.rainbow 981228