Copenhagen epilogue

Climate change and hardiness zones

Here is another indicator of our changing climate:

Link to hardiness zones between 1990-2006:

Hello Lafayette from Copenhagen! As many of you know, Christine and I are in Copenhagen, Denmark. We had great aspirations of attending the Copenhagen Climate Conference which I'm sure you've heard all about on the news. We're trying to keep a blog going, however we (along with about 20000 other people) have been kept out of the conference due to the facilities being under-capacity. With sporadic internet access, we're trying to keep the blog updated. Check it out! Also, you can follow our twitter tweets here.

In other news, the city is absolutely gorgeous. We're staying out of trouble and following the conference as best we can from the outside. Don't take the ridiculous headlines that protests are getting brutal too seriously. They are, but in my opinion the protesters are asking for trouble. The NGOs should let the politicians and scientists do their job and try to follow what's going on without making the process more difficult for everyone. Honestly, getting in the way isn't going to give us a better treaty.

CLEAR Act

Here is some basic information about the CLEAR Act:

Link to CLEAR Act

Giant iceberg off Antarctica

This huge piece of ice has broken off the Antarctic continent and is moving north.

Here is a link:

What is cap and trade all about?

Many of you may have heard of cap and trade as a way to reduce heat-trapping gases and slow down climate change. It's one of the issues that are on the table at Copenhagen, and it's also being discussed in the U.S. senate right now.

So what exactly is cap and trade? Well, an entertaining cartoon called "The Story of Cap and Trade" has been making the rounds in emails and blogs that does a fairly good job of laying out the basics of what a cap and trade bill could look like, but it's definitely far from the full story. David Doniger from the Natural Resources Defense Council has gone into a lot of the details that the cartoon left out and commented on both Paul Krugman's (who won the Nobel Prize in economics and is a columnist at the New York Times) and Jim Hansen's (who is a top climate change scientist at NASA) thoughts on cap and trade. I highly recommend going through these articles and others that are written by experts in the field.

Feel free to add your own thoughts or links to articles on climate change legislation, too!

Copenhagen Climate Meeting

Today's the first day of a two-week long meeting on climate change that brings together leaders from around the world. President Obama announced that he will be attending the meeting, and if you're interested in getting more information, check out the conference's official website.