Fantastic chapter, Shayne. But so chilling.
“I thought we could turn it all around. I still think we could have, but the world kept getting hotter and hotter and the snow kept melting. That was the beginning of the end.”
“The peat bogs in Siberia were releasing billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere, methane that was twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Scientists had predictions and models for just how fast things would turn bad, but they didn't take into account what was happening. It was worse than their most pessimistic predictions.”
I have read about this. In a worst-case scenario, the melting of the peat bogs in Siberia could cause a complete and irreversible climate catastrophe.
“There were four hundred billion tons of methane hydrate in the permafrost…and all it took was a release of one half of one percent of that to double the speed of global warming. The hotter it got, the more methane was released. Eventually the methane pockets in the ocean started to thaw as the water got warmer. There were fourteen thousand billion tons in the oceans.”
You start a chain reaction, and there is no stopping it.
Recently I read a columnist in New York Times who said something like this (and this is not an exact quote):
Our saving grace, our inability to affect the planet as a whole, is being lost to us. Like Debbie, I hope that the new Clark and the new Lois will stay on this world. They have lost so much and they are so used to all sorts of calamities that they should be able to deal with being the kind of celebrities that they are going to be on their new home world. And they should be able to deal with being unable to hide behind secret identities.
"Our" Clark and "our" Lois, however, should return to Clark's world. If they are very, very lucky, they might keep Clark's secret identity. And they can be together, and they can be partners at the Daily Planet, and Lois can have her sister back, sort of. It sounds like an ideal solution.
If only we had a Superman to help us out of the climate mess we are creating for ourselves!
Finally, on a lighter note, I just have to comment on something that made me giggle:
The other man would be able to maintain that spin much more easily than he would be able to continue blowing. Clark wasn't sure that what he was watching was even possible given the rules of physics as he understood them.
Of course, nothing Clark himself did was explainable by physics either.
Giggling is good! Insert a tittering emoticon here.
This remains a fantastic story, Shayne. I will be sorry to see it come to an end. But, hmmm... a slight request here... do you mind letting us get a glimpse of how Lois and Clark are getting on in their new life together, assuming you are planning to give them one?
Ann
