Chapter 4 of The Precipice in poem form

I missed a session of my Precipice Reading Group, which meant I had to send in a summary of the week’s reading to my facilitator. For some reason I wrote it as a poem.

I do not claim that reading this is better than reading the actual chapter of the book. This poem is not comprehensive, it focuses on the two largest anthropogenic risks discussed in chapter 4. This poem is not endorsed by Toby Ord. Creative licenses were taken for the sake of rhyming. If you have a criticism of the accuracy please make sure to form your criticism in a rhyming stanza that could replace whatever you think is inaccurate. Enjoy!

So many times we’ve come close

To nuclear war

Tomorrow it may come

Knocking down your door

You might be lucky

To be killed right away

For a worse fate awaits

Those not in the way

As the soot rises

Into the sky

The chances of death

Become pretty high

A new ice age descends

And for five years we wait

Freezing and starving

For the darkness to abate

Then ten more years until

The sunlight fully allumes

Our little rock in space

And normal life resumes

While most of us will die

Or be very sad

This could be much worse

And very very bad

For Toby Ord thinks

It is an important distinction

That many deaths is bad

But better than extinction

So who will be left

To preserve the species?

New Zealand, of course

On their island of kiwis

They will peck at their seeds

While a new era harkens

With a bit of light left

As the rest of the world darkens

For the kiwis are neutral

And safe from attack

And live on an island

Where the sky is less black.

If nuclear winter

Does not cause us to expire

We can look forward

To setting earth on fire

For if greenhouses runaway

and we continue to drill oil

Cascading effects

Might cause the oceans to boil

So the earth could become

Unfortunately for us

Uninhabitable to all life

Just like Venus

If that doesn’t occur

A moist greenhouse effect might

Still kill us all off

But leave the oceans in sight

While this is unlikely

According to scientific consensus

It would be so bad

We should still try to prevent this

Even if we stopped

Emitting entirely

More carbon lies dormant

Than we’ve emitted in history

It rests deep in the oceans

And in permafrost

So if current warming releases it

All hope is lost.