Learning from Slow Leaks

This is another in Molten Eagle's reading between the lines series designed to suggest hidden news to more capable readers and curiosity to those less practiced in abstract issues or their critical thinking abilities.

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While slow leaks may encourage continued complacency among the passive, to the swift such leaks may compel both immediate action and better survival plans. - LCDR Horace T. Broder (1908)

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First, consider this:

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Nov. 16, 2010 (AP) Two researchers want NASA to punch one-way tickets to Mars

The colleagues state that humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth.

The main point is to get Mars exploration moving, said Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University, who wrote the article in the latest Journal of Cosmology with Paul Davies of Arizona State University.

President Obama informed NASA in April that he “ ‘believed by the mid-2030s that we could send humans to orbit Mars and safely return them to Earth. And that a landing would soon follow,’ ’’ said agency spokesman Michael Braukus. Nowhere did Obama suggest the astronauts be left behind.

The colleagues state that humans must begin colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth.

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Next, consider this:

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Nov. 21, 2010 (AP) Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue

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They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane _ a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide _ at a perilous rate.

More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere. - Katey Walter Anthony, , Ph.D, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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"In another 30 years all of Chersky will look like this." - Sergey Aphanasievich Zimov, a Russian scientist, and the director of the Northeast Science Station in Cherskii in the Russian Republic of Sakha in northeastern Siberia.[1]

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Questions for thought

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In your opinion, is methane a climate time bomb due to explode in 2030?

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Could Zimov's methane forecast have anything to do with the need Schulze-Makuch and Davies have expressed for colonizing another planet as a hedge against a catastrophe on Earth?

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Does any of this have anything to do with President Obama's stated belief that by the mid-2030s we could send humans to orbit Mars?

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CAUTION: BMW expands landfill-methane electrical generation - Care to reconsider your answers now?

Since 2002, BMW's assembly plant in Spartanburg, SC has been using methane captured from a nearby landfill site to fuel electrical generators. ... The co-generation system also uses hot water in addition to the electricity to provide 60% of all the energy required for the entire plant.

Were AP journalists being too one-sided?

Submarines are always silent and strange.