Flop Friday?

Everyone over at Copenhagen has been having fun with nicknames for the remaining days they have had in which to pull a rabbit out of their collective hat. The most telling I think is "Flop Friday" - as explained on Radio National Breakfast today as "when they dress up failure as success".

Will it be? We can hope not, but it certainly seems that way.

And the hosts seem to have been getting quite wound up that they would not come out of the massive expenditure of this 'event'  within having their city name permanently attached to a global moniker  to permanently remind the world of Copenhagen, as we are regularly reminded of Montreal and Kyoto. (To be fair they probably also want to see a positive outcome for the sake of the positive outcome.)

Amid growing cockiness amoung the naysayers and propagation of various myths ("we're actually cooling' - Andrew Bolt), the BBC has put together a neat summary and animated presentation that explains the key problems.

There's been a bit of a global focus on the possible plight of our koalas too, due to their highly specialised diet. But that's just the tip of the iceberg so to speak. In Australia, climate change will see massive losses of species due to the highly fragmented vegetation communities we have. The key thing is the sheer pace of the change - vegetation communities will not be able to 'migrate' fast enough to keep pace with the climate shifts. And any shifting they can achieve will be further fragmented by the isolating effects of surrounding development - either urban or rural. We have evolved a network of national parks and reserves. The veg communities they are meant to preserve will die out, to be overtaken by veg mixes typical of warmer situations. And the animal species peculiar to those locations will have nowhere to go. They'll simply fritter away into local or complete extinction.

A couple of other key points:
Icecap melting is often the focus of the media when talking of sea level rise - it's visible. But the global impact of that is minute compared to the far less visible impact of the simple fact that warmer water expands.

And another less visible problem is the chance of Russian and Canadian permafrosts melting, the CO2 releases from them could see us hit a tipping point that leads to the whole situation possibly going runaway.