Herewith my Summer Solstice Eisteddfood poem, despite that it consists of a poem by a scientist (groan), it recieved polite to moderately enthusiastic applause, the climate skeptic did not attend the event, so I can at least claim victory by default.

Hail to the Sun

The following figures are all very true, except for the last one,

The last ones a guess, and I’m hoping it’s wrong.

This Midsummer twenty eleven, world population hits seven billion

Around the globe we burn, each and every second

Three hundred tonnes of fossilised fuel, every single second.

Last year we sent to the skies

A whole thirty gigatonnes of C O  Two,

So about a millions years worth of sunlight stored

Goes up in smoke each year now, and it’s rising,

The temperature’s gone up by one degree

The weather gets odder, new records set with every passing season

Two degrees spells disaster, four of them bring catastrophe

And at six degrees it’s another global climate apocalypse.

Welcome to another mass extinction event, and this time it’s ours.

Of our seven billion, a billion eat poorly already,

The green revolution runs out with the oil.

We could burn up the gas and the coal and the shale

Concrete the fields and fight for the food and the water,

Despoil all the oceans for the last of the fish.

World population, just one lifetime hence, perhaps fifteen billion,

More likely methinks, just a few hundred thousand,

Scratching a living in the caves and the ruins.

Yet enough sunlight falls daily to power the world as it is

Hail to the Sun; let us seek the wisdom to use it.