Extinction-level Event

To get an idea what is meant

By these words which could cause discontent,

Why don’t we cavort

Through the real import

Of extinction-level event?

A dead end in Darwin’s Descent

Which humans (and others) lament,

We’ll lose all we’ve won,

It’s gone, finished, done,

In extinction-level event.

Think extinct—one hundred percent,

Defunct, wrecked, kaput, shot, and spent;

We’re too maladjusted,

We’re broken, screwed, busted

From extinction-level event.

It’s my view, you’re free to dissent,

But I think that we can’t circumvent

Never more to awake,

It’s now baked in the cake,

This extinction-level event.

So accept what we cannot prevent:

It’s over, sunk, fixed in cement;

Let’s get through our head

It means we’re all dead,

Our extinction-level event.

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.

The Giving Tree

When we were just young and carefree,

There was no ending we could foresee;

We’d eat apples, and swing,

And see what we could wring
As gifts from the giving tree.

We chopped it up, went on a spree—

And a lot ended up as debris;

With replacements withdrawn,

What we needed was gone:

The stuff of the giving tree.

At the end of our tale we might see

A meaning for you and for me,

And wind up admitting

We’re old, and we’re sitting

On the stump of the giving tree.

Doomer Humor

We've suffered a pretty hard climb

Since humans first crawled from the slime,

But it’s already clear,

That we’ll only be here

For a limited period of time.

               *          *          *

Much depends on your own point of view:

When oil’s gone, doom hits in Baku,

Misery hurts Timbuktu,

And Kalamazoo,

But it’s lots worse when doom comes to you.

               *          *          *

Nervous Nellies are silly with fears:

Every new poison leaves them in tears;

So what if they spray,

It will all wash away

In a couple of million years.

               *          *          *

The absence of vittles to glean

Will ration our daily cuisine;

When food chains collapse,

There won’t even be scraps—

Unless you count Soylent Green.

               *          *          *

Species, they come and they go,

As the universe molecules flow;

Soon our planet will burn,

So we’ll finish our turn

Coming down off the oil plateau. D’oh! 

               *          *          *

Folks who talk doom quite a lot

Stay sane while they study fate’s plot;

To make it apparent

That you’re not aberrant,

Try talking with folks who do not.

               *          *          *

When the earth gets less biodiverse,

Extinction might not be a curse;

One thing’s for sure:

Since we don’t have a cure,

The future is going to be worse. 

               *          *          *

Our science, once fuel’s withdrawn,
Revisits its primitive dawn;
If you’re bent on knowing
Where science is going,
That’s easy: It’s going to be gone.

               *          *          *

As we head back to Stone Age and jungle,
Survival is something we’ll bungle;
Evolution’s new picks
After Extinction Six
Might not show much life higher than fungal. 

               *          *          *

To us, it seems like a curse,

That everyday life will get worse;
While to us that’s extreme,
In the overall scheme,
Ain’t no thing to the whole universe.

               *          *          *

We’re kicking the can down the road
While watching our morals erode;
We’re waiting to see
How long it will be
Before we’re swirled down the commode.

               *          *          *

If we’re tapping our SPR

Perhaps the end isn’t too far;
My anxiety’s higher
If things are that dire,
But it’s cool, ‘cause I top off my car.

               *          *          *

We’re already starting to greet

The beginning of more and more heat;
When the world gets too warm,
We’ll start to transform
From flesh to lightly cooked meat.

               *          *          *

We read about doom on the ‘net
In hopes we can cheat fate’s roulette;
If that doesn’t work,
We won’t go berserk
‘Cause prepared, we’ll become less upset.

               *          *          *

In another year of detour,
With the fan mostly clear of manure,
We’ll still be here pitching,
A-whining and bitching
That doom will hit next year for sure.

               *          *          *

Executives often use graphing
To find where to cut down on staffing;
When it happens, don’t fume,
Read some limericks of doom:
You’ll be dead, but at least you’ll die laughing.

               *          *          *

It seems we evolved to compete—
Including the shrewdness to cheat;
It’s just rinse and repeat,
But if you think you’re sweet,
Take your socks off and smell your feet.

               *          *          *

He jumped off from floor forty-four,
The wind in his ears made a roar;
“That Peak Oiler lore
Is all crap,” so he swore,
As he sailed past the twentieth floor.

               *          *          *

So bookstores no longer succeed
Distributing great work and screed;
You might think that’s sad,
But let me just add:
Soon no one will know how to read.

               *          *          *

To adapt, if you wish to compete
In conditions we’re shortly to meet:
It will help you a lot
If you like weather hot
And can learn to need nothing to eat.

               *          *          *

A normal consenting adult

Fell in with a crazy doom cult;
Obsession with oil
And when habitats broil
Was an unexpected result.

               *          *          *

We think that since we’re in the know,
We won’t end like those saying, “D’oh!”
But when oil stops its flow,
The fast drop from plateau
Won’t leave time to say, “Tol’ ja so!”

               *          *          *

In the course of becoming awake,
My mental preps gave me a break:
Relaxed and unhurried,
I’m now much less worried
‘Cause the endings’s baked into the cake.

               *          *          *

I don’t want to read in the paper
Of a nearby atomic bomb caper;
I ain’t no hero,
Put me at ground zero:
In a flash, I’ll be turned into vapor.

               *          *          *

Since the first a-bomb, years have gone by,
Yet one rule seems to always apply:
When the bombs start to glow,
Bend over real low,
And kiss your sweet ass goodbye. 

               *          *          *

A one-size-fits-all prep to try
Is keeping loose-jointed and spry;
Then when life gets too rough,
You’re limber enough
To kiss your sweet ass goodbye.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

The ant was preparedness bound,

While the grasshopper just screwed around;

Studied reflection

On moral perfection

From stories like this can be found.

Fables provide us with maps

So that living life’s not shooting craps;

Use this tale as a guide:

Both of them died

From ecosystem collapse.

The Music of the Spheres

As if ruled by celestial gears,
Every sun and each planet steers
Through the timeless time
To the endless space chime
Of the music of the spheres.

And once in a great while appears
A collection of atoms which hears
Air vibrations beguile
And, once in a while,
The music of the spheres.

But none of them perseveres
When their favorable niche disappears;
And in every case
They don’t leave a trace,
Just the music of the spheres.

We mean nothing, we and our peers,
In the infinite miles and years,
In the endless place
At the timeless pace
Of the music of the spheres.     

Acceptance

The yeast cell looked Man in the eye,
And asked, once again, with a sigh,
“You know we’re related,
So how are you fated
To be any more free than I?”

It’s one-sided to think that we caved
In approving a world that’s depraved;
The comfort and pleasure
We get from our leisure
Are exactly the things that we craved.

The leopard does what leopards do,
We humans must do our thing too;
So have no regrets,
It’s as good as it gets,
And soon our time will be all through.

Since we’re so near the end, let’s review:
Did we do great things from what we knew?
Did we reach some fine goal?
Bad or good, on the whole?
—We did what animals do.

Did we fail, or do what we should?
Were we noble, or misunderstood?
Were we bad, were we good?
—We did what we could
The way every animal should.

Homo colossus, we were,
And we did things the way we prefer;
But soon we’ll be gone,
There’ll come a new dawn,
Then something else will occur.

If I were to guess where we went
When we go through our final descent:
Acceptance, full scope,
With the loss of all hope
Is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

“Until the rivers stop flowing”
Used to mean what we’d never be knowing;
But while we’re plateauing
The water’s now slowing—
Just one woe we’ll be undergoing.

It’s so hard to comprehend
That we broke something we cannot mend;
Yet worse, my dear friend,
When we follow our trend,
That all this will actually end.

Fast crash versus slow decay:
I can wish, but events won’t obey;
Plus, to my dismay,
I get fuck all to say,
So I guess I’ll accept either way.