Ecology

I’ve concluded from data presented,
That extinction cannot be prevented;
An extinction event
Should gain wide assent
That where we’re at’s unprecedented.

The way that I see collapse:
First, scarcity, living on scraps;
Then heat waves will spread
Until everyone’s dead—
And there’s not much time left to elapse.

We can migrate, but have little chance
Of outrunning the warming’s advance;
One reason we’re screwed
Is depletion of food:
We can move a lot faster than plants.

Should a pole-living end scene befall,
A farm will be hard to install;
Under South Pole ice stocks
The soil’s full of rocks,
At the North, there’s no soil at all.

The Sixth Great Extinction insures
That we’re not going to see any cures;
While that’s what I see,
My vision might be
Less optimistic than yours.

That it’s over is hard to accept,
No matter how hard one has prepped;
But we’re really inept,
And can’t intercept
The poo into which we have stepped.

We humans are high primate-linked,
From the food chain’s top we grinned and winked;
It’s been loads of fun,
But soon we’ll be done
And join animals labeled extinct.

The oncoming methane disaster
Is too big for humans to master;
The reason we’re beat:
With increasing heat
The bubbles rise faster and faster.

Having now had our turn at bat,
We’re leaving the world going splat;
Not just suicide,
But killing worldwide:
We’re destroying our habitat.

We try to preserve what we’ve got,
Too bad that it doesn’t mean squat;
We think we're transforming
But with global warming
The weather will be much too hot.

Species will try to survive
Mass extinction that’s due to arrive,
But without any maps
Through food chain collapse,
Humans won’t get out alive.

Humans will become obsolete
As the ecosphere builds up more heat;
There’s no time to adapt
So the place we’ll be trapped
Is too hot—and with nothing to eat.

When carbon to eat takes a hit,
And temperature’s up quite a bit,
And oceans turn acid
We won’t be so placid
‘Cause we’ll no longer be where we fit.

If it’s too hot except at the poles,
Lack of plants there will cut folk’s food goals; 
And the sea all about—
More acid, fished out—
It also won’t fill up their bowls.

The oceans will get much more dead
When base turns to acid instead;
Now litmus turns blue
But with more CO₂
It will all of a sudden turn red.

Life’s relation to earth we cement
When we celebrate all that it’s meant;
Since we don’t have a choice,
We’re soon to rejoice
In our sixth great extinction event.

A drop comes after plateau,
Goodbye comes after hello;
There’s no one to blame,
We already came,
And now we’re going to go.

In this doom, which we can foresee,
Complex life will be mostly debris;
Once PO has spread,
We’ll wish we were dead—
Global warming makes sure we will be.