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What happens when you carbonate mead?

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No. If you let the fermentation complete and followed the JAO recipe, the yeast will have killed themselves with alcohol toxicity even though there is still plenty of fermentable sugar. Adding a little extra corn sugar will just leave you a little sweeter.

In most beers, you don't come anywhere near the alcohol tolerance of the yeast. That is why adding some sugar leads to more fermentation and carbonation in the bottle. You can carbonate meads this way, but need to use a recipe that ends dry, with an amount of alcohol lower than the yeasts tolerance level. There are some good threads on the subject if you do a search for the term atmospheres (particularly with Oskaar as author).

Trying to make a sweet mead sparkling can lead to bottle bombs if not done with extreme caution. If the yeast have enough sugar they can easily generate enough pressure to explode even a Champagne bottle.

Medsen
 
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One minor qualification to what Medsen said... if your batch fermented to dryness (rare for a JAO, but it occasionally happens) then there is a slight possibility that enough viable yeast remain to support bottle conditioning - although the likelihood is pretty small.

Everything else he mentioned (especially about attempting bottle carbonation of a mead with residual sweetness) should be heeded!
 
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