Too Late - Andrew Barham

An untimely deadline missed
Beguiles an unlikely tryst
With a warm wind blowing
Through all seeing but not knowing
How blue is blue can be –
How blue is the sea?
And the sky falling down
For our home is warming now
More rapidly than we thought it would
More rapidly than they said it should
Way back in 1990
When Scientists could not agree
Though by 1993
They did consensus see;

There are tipping points three
We hoped we might not see
In our lifetime though
Of these our children might know
Them more intimately:
Glaciers melting majestically
Mountains of ice plunging into the sea
Happening unexpectedly
The others are happening too:
As these things often do
Stricken forests burning bright
Lighting up the darkest night
It's not exactly a pretty sight,
The greenwood consumed in infernal light;

We see in slow motion
Glaciers falling into the ocean
As Greenland's ice caps melt -
And new land like a green felt
Emerges to sore amaze our eyes
With unimpeachable data that defies
The skeptic's and the denier's lies
This too rapid melting of the ice.
As the polar ice recedes
And our beleaguered planet bleeds,
Nations and oil companies compete
To see which one can beat
The others to get there first
And satisfy their insatiable thirst

It's not just ice that's disappearing
That third tipping point Scientists were fearing
Was the melting of the permafrost
Happening rapidly at the cost
Of northern communities:
As the permanently hard soil recedes
And the frozen ground begins to thaw
Whole towns slump and sink into the maw
Of the boggy earth below
(Though now the trees there grow);
The consequence comes and goes
As the peat begins to decompose
Releasing more carbon into the air
(Of this, the Scientists were scared.)

There is a fourth tipping point
That can really shake up this joint
The most frightening one by far
(We forget the biosphere is like a jar
With everything sealed within
Which is why we Scientists make such a din
About the dangers we all are in)
While the politicians spin
Saying the potential harm
Is just Scientists spreading alarm
For some sort of personal gain
Though I notice they refrain
From saying what these benefits be
From this imagined conspiracy

Only very recently
Within a month or three
Russian Scientists did observe
Something new to throw a curve
Into our calculations
That will really rock all nations
The fourth tipping point
With which to anoint
Our most dire prophecies
Far worse than rising seas
A runaway greenhouse effect
We will soon begin to detect
For methane bubbling from the ocean floor
Shall cause the planet to warm even more …

Andrew Barham