Don, that is a great story!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Don Spence" <dkspence@TELUS.NET>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 10:16 PM
Subject: OT Hurricanes--really an accident? A fryeday tale- not

> 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?
> >
>