Fibs in NZ -- and climate change

     A few days ago, on August 21, it was Poet's Day in New Zealand and the blog sciencelens.com featured a math-poetry theme; that posting mentions the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (for which Sarah Glaz and I are co-editors) and offers several Fibs, poems whose syllable-counts follow the first six non-zero Fibonacci numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, . . .., with each succeeding number the sum of the two preceding). 

     In the spirit of that posting and responding to recent news in The Washington Post that Arctic sea ice has reached a record low, signalling new worries about the speed of climate change, I offer two poems structured by the Fibonacci numbers -- the first comments on climate change (and the Fibonacci numbers count syllables) and the second speaks of what it is -- a mathy poem using the Fibonacci numbers to count letters.   Both of these poems follow increase-then-decrease patterns -- similar to the growing-melting pattern of "snowballs."  (See 5 August 2010 and 25 July 2012 postings for some snowballs; additional Fibonacci-count poems may be found on 31 October 2010; use the blog search feature (in green in the right-hand column of the blog) using "Fib" or "Fibonacci" to find a variety of additional examples.)

     This
     hot
     summer
     has led more
     people to believe
     global warming is happening
     than the piles of statistics amassed by scientists -- 

     bad to worse since 1950  --
     ice caps melting, drought,
     sea levels
     rising.
     Oh,
     My!

Fibbish!

O,

I

go

for

mathy

patterns,

poems

set

on

1,

1.

For more about effects of weather and climate, follow this link to Elizabeth Kolbert's recent remarks in The New Yorker -- she connects climate change with this year's failing corn crop.