Make fun of “global warming” if you must,
Call it “something the scientists dreamed up”
Say “It doesn’t cause bad storms, you trust,”
Set your teeth and get steamed up.

But, global warming is an absolute fact,
By nature’s current cycle or man’s actions.
Year on year, polar ice caps farther retract,
And species migrate for habitat tractions.

Northwest Native Americans report fish kill
 Of size river never known to deliver.
Suspect upstream mine leeching spill,
But species were found new to river.

Species common to southern streams
Returned from sea and lost its way.
Temperature of water, surely seems,
Confused fish where eggs to lay.

Spawned, and as salmon parents do,
Died, fed birds, bears and such,
Eggs hatched and imprinted anew,
Next cycle, returned to new river, in touch.

Entrepreneurs turn north their hungry gaze,
As global earth basks white shoulders —
Ice submits more annually, in summer haze,
To creeping tundra, and round boulders.

As longer summers loosen winter’s grip,
Shipping lanes open, Scandinavia to Asia,
From Asia to U.S. rails, Canadian trip,
Northwest Passage — no longer fantasia.

For plans have been made for slips,
Indeed, construction’s well under way,
A port’o call for these northern ships,
In Canada's Churchill on Hudson Bay.

As Arctic day replaces Equatorial week,
Thousands are saved in costs to ship.
As white space shrinks, men seek
Frontier gold, crack of musher’s whip.

So global warming is fact of the land,
And visionaries are cashing on it big,
Our leaders have heads in fossil sand,
And from carbonic hole we must dig,

For if progression of warming this be
Of natural or man-made, accidental cause,
Inevitability becomes catastrophe,
Yet hope harmonizes greenhouse laws.

© 2005 R. Leland Waldrip