Funny thing is, the darkness and doom came from cooling, but, of course, this is meant to highlight the Coming Doom from a slight increase in global temperatures from Someone Else driving a fossil fueled vehicle
Lord Byron’s ‘Darkness’: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Climate Change
In 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora experienced a super-eruption, triggering global climate shifts that produced famine, riots, disease outbreak, and mass death.
The great Romantic poet Lord Byron, holed up in Geneva at the time, responded with a post-apocalyptic poem called “Darkness,” which portrayed a vision of an “icy Earth” full of desolation, burning cities, and global warfare. Nearly two centuries on, it remains a poignant portrait of a future marred by climate disaster.
Mount Tambora’s volcanic ash, ejected into the upper atmosphere, eventually fell back to Earth, bringing stasis once again to the planet. But in Byron’s post-apocalyptic landscape, climate change and its effects are permanent. It’s a bleak, bleak world; a Romantic-era precursor to the monochromatic desolation of Cormac McCarthy’sThe Road.
Of course, the entire poem is about doom from an icy world post-Tambora. Somehow, this means, in the fevered mind of a Warmist, doom from warming
Perhaps Byron might have privately felt that technological advancement and byproducts of manufacture and consumption could create unintended ecological effects, though the modern concept of ecology itself was still being refined. Nothing we have in existing letters or anecdotes suggests he commented on it. Regardless, “Darkness” exists as a future vision of how humanity might devolve in the face of climate change.
The author, DJ Pangburn, doesn’t seem to see the insanity of using natural cooling from a massive volcanic event, which brought on the poem, to whine about warming, which, in his fevered Warmist mind, is caused by Mankind.
 And what did Byron see after all humans and other creatures vanish from the Earth?
…The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.Now that is darkness. Think upon it the next time you read about fluctuations in global climate. The Byronic post-apocalyptic Earth is extreme, but so are we as a species, and in the way we interact with the planet. In “Darkness,” Byron just held up the mirror.
Seriously, these people live in a very strange world. The darkness came from natural cooling. Somehow, again, we’re to see similar doom from a slight increase in global temperatures over 160+ years.
