Mother Jones: Global Climate Change:

".... on the ESC's list is the dimunitive Kauai Creeper, a 4" tall bird that's languished waiting to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Found only on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the creeper (also called the Akikiki) has been on the ESA waitlist since 1994. Now, there's only an estimated 1300 individuals left (down from 7,000 in 1970) most of which live in a 14-square mile patch of swamp.

....rapid population decline in native birds is not an unfamiliar tale to local biologists. Hawaii is one of the most biodiverse locations in the United States, yet habitat for most animals is restricted due to the island being, well, an island. Not only is land and vegetation limited, invasive species are especially devastating to the small ecosystem. Housecats, for example, prey on adult and juvenile Kauai creepers, feral pigs eat and destroy plants the creepers need for habitat, and mosquitoes carry avian malaria that the birds have no natural defenses against.

...As global warming ramps up, more and more of Hawaii's forests will become warm enough (55 degrees F or higher) for mosquitoes to thrive and multiply, potentially increasing disease threats to many animals...."

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<http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/12/cute-endangered-animals-global-warming-edition>


"Copenhagen: Too Hot To Handle"

"..... America will be represented by a career political operative, Todd Stern, as chief climate negotiator. And probably Hillary Clinton. And quite possibly Barack Obama....

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.....most likely drags on into 2010 as the negotiators lurch toward some kind of middle ground. Which could mean, in the end, a treaty that at least moves us in the direction of the target that most people have been talking about for the last five years: holding temperature increases under two degrees Celsius and an atmospheric concentration of 450 parts per million (ppm) CO2.

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Physics and chemistry, they're called—and they're throwing a serious monkey wrench into the proceedings. It started in the summer of 2007 when the Arctic melted with sudden and unexpected haste, 30 years ahead of what even the more pessimistic scientists were forecasting.....

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A few months after all that ice melted in 2007, our foremost climatologists gave us a new number to aim for: 350 ppm. NASA's James Hansen and his team issued a series of papers showing that any atmospheric carbon content greater than that appears not to be compatible with "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed....

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Hansen and his team warn that a world of 450 ppm CO2 is a world that will eventually be largely ice free. That will take some time—those Antarctic ice sheets are miles thick. But there's plenty of change coming at us already. Dengue fever, carried by mosquitoes rapidly expanding their range in our newly warming world, has increased thirtyfold in the past 50 years. (A recent report indicated it could easily spread to more than half the states in the union.) Glaciers are melting before our eyes. (Glacier National Park will need a new name as early as 2020—the source of the Ganges could be a dusty hillside 15 years later.)

Drought is becoming endemic across the American Southwest and in parts of Australia—some 200 people died this year around Melbourne when wildfires whipped through after a heat wave. A recent study predicted a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, will have dried up by 2021. Meanwhile, since all the water that's evaporating out of dry areas must eventually come back down, deluges (like the record rains in India that put a million people out of their homes in 2006) are getting worse. This is the kind of trouble you get at 387 ppm. You really want to go for 450?

If you had to pick a country to serve as a proxy for physics and chemistry at the Copenhagen talks, the Maldives would be a good place to start. This archipelago of 1,190 islands, most of them only a few feet above sea level, has a population of barely 400,000, so it won't carry enormous clout in Copenhagen. It does have a certain moral authority, since under the deal that the EU and Obama are pushing for it probably won't exist much longer. (See also "To the Lifeboats.") To make matters worse, the islands depend on the fringing reefs that surround them for protection from waves and storms. But that coral is dying because the carbon in the atmosphere is turning the ocean more acidic. The pH of the sea—the whole damned Earth-girdling sea—has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and is apparently on its way to 7.8 in the lifetime of babies born today. In July marine scientists in London released a statement saying that long-term CO2 concentrations above 360 ppm will mean the death of all coral on the planet. Which explains why Mohamed Nasheed, the dynamic new president of the Maldives, says failure to reach agreement would amount to a "suicide pact." And then there's Bangladesh. There are the African countries already dying from drought. The UN raised a lot of new flags in the last century. Get ready to watch them start coming down.
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<http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/copenhagen-too-hot-handle>

at least it will make for some spectacular news specials.