Today’s poem is a mixture of quotation, paraphrase, & commentary on something one inactivist denier actually said. Presumably, with a straight face. A straight cold callous inhuman face.
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wet feet
should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet actually do what the scientists threaten — & slip off into the sea — is it really be the end-of-the-world calamity they contend
even if the sea rose 6 metres — it would only reclaim about 42,000 square kilometres of coastline where roughly about 400 million people currently live
that sounds quite a lot of people — but hardly all humanity — less than 6% of world population which is to say — 94% of us need not fear — inundation
after all — it’s simply an equivalent number of people to the entire population of the US & UK — combined a mere drop in the ocean — you might wryly remark
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Day 30 — TIL i learnt we’re bombing the ocean
hot water
year after year we’re setting ocean heat records
last year alone they absorbed eight Hiroshima
atomic bombs detonating every second
of every day
— nearly seven hundred thousand every day
— five million a week
— a Quarter. Of a. Billion. Bomb’s. Worth. Every. Year.
* 480 a minute / 28 800 an hour / 691 200 a day / 4 838 400 a week / 251 596 800 a year
Working on poems about each of the IPCC Assessment Reports as well as the various Protocols that have been signed. This shows how unserious some of these conversations really are. There was much discussion over a single sentence. The balance of evidence suggests human influence on global climate. The debate over this sentence lasted well over several hours & various alternatives were proposed. This poem is non-factual fly-on-the-wall dialogue of that event.
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IPCC Madrid 1995 — the Saudis take the piss
Saudi Arabia : I’m sorry, “balance of evidence” is far too strong.
Too often, my first drafts while researching topics are a bit heavy-handed, a bit dry. This one I like because it’s more ethereal. More elegant. I probably shouldn’t post it in its entirety. But I must: I like it. And the Poetic Factoid is just fun.
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The Horse-Powered Apocalypse
She doesn’t rustle branches. Hair doesn’t ruffle. She doesn’t arch up like a wave. Earth doesn’t tremble.
She is subtle, predatory. Something almost unholy. She sneaks, thief-like but ends by committing assault.
She is vital, active, brutal. Kills more every year than guns. Yet we rarely consider her. We scoff at and scorn her.
She is extreme. She is coming Correction. She. Is. Here.
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Day 22 — TIL about comfort zones
rift valley thermostat
as a general rule our genes love heat preferring desert island paradises to ice-covered coldilocks zones
the majority of times when we can choose how our air is conditioned preferred temperature is a low humidity 22°c
a combination that closely resembles humanity’s east african birthplace where we first walked hundreds of thousands of years ago
Ironically I’m sitting at the puta writing a poem about energy when I am exhausted after a very long day.
Two Notes: 1. Formatting is an issue (the poems don’t look as good as they do properly formatted in a word doc) as is often the way with WordPress. 2. The old maxim, sorry about the long poems, I didn’t have time to write short ones is particularly true tonight.
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Australian Energy — a call & response poem
Australia is the third-largest exporter of coal in the world
no, it’s the biggest
home to two of the 10 largest coal mines in the world
four of the 10
Australians believe {of the total workforce} : the coal mining industry makes up 11%
in reality it’s just 0.3%
oil & gas employment make up 20%
just 0.2%
Australians believe {of GDP} : the economic value of the gas industry is 12.4%
2.5%
coal mining contributes 13.6%
2.6%
50% of Australians believe {of what we should be building} : new gas power stations
only 21% believe we should be building new renewable energy projects
my apologies i was confused
let me try that again
50% of Australians believe: new renewable energy projects
only 21% believe we should be building new gas power stations
the 2023-2024 Australian Federal Budget has been released fossil fuel subsidies (such as the Fuel Tax Credit) – will cost the Budget over $41 billion over the next four years
significantly more than all the funded climate initiatives combined
despite fossil fuel industries being the past
& clean energy initiatives, the future
(perhaps, assuming
we survive)
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Funfact Day 3 – TIL how to grow iconic French architecture
Paris’s brutal metal heart — the Eiffel Tower can be as much as fifteen to sixteen centimetres taller in summer
{ thermal expansion heats the iron up the particles gain kinetic energy & in so doing : take up more space }
think how tall she will get when The Iron Lady starts experiencing month long 40+ degree days
when Ville-Lumière becomes Ville-Chaleur & Ville d’Amour becomes Ville d’Sueur
{ City of Light melts into City of Heat & City of Love drips into City of Sweat }
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Funfact Day 3 (bonus) – TIL other Eiffel things
i. the Tower was initially intended for Barcelona but those pesky Catalans thought it an awful eyeful (ouch!) so Gustave pitched her to Paris instead
ii. initially the French weren’t overly impressed either metal-shaming her as “useless & monstrous” “a stupefying folly” & “an odious column of bolted metal”
always something of a prickly loner writer Guy de Maupassant dined every day at the cafe directly below — the only spot in Paris he claimed he couldn’t see the damn thing
but they grew to love her — as did the whole world till she became what she now is (like so many modern landmarks) little more than Instafodder
gareth roi poet boi 