COPing with Climate Change (hah hah hah)

COP15 is here, and yesterday, the city went nuts.

Okay, not nuts, but there's a noticeable excitement around the place. Every large public area in Copenhagen has some kind of display, tent, booth, or exhibit on climate change.

• Greenpeace has docked their ship in Copenhagen's harbor. Y'know, the ship they use to run off giant Japanese whaling tankers. That one.
  
• The World Wildlife Fund (perhaps most famous for metaphorically beating the crap out of a wrestling organization) has a huge tent a block away from DIS where they're showing films, holding lectures, and so on.
• Just outside the tent, there is a massive polar bear statue made out of ice (pictured below). Inside is a bronze skeleton, which will be all that is left when the statue melts, representing the endangered nature of the animal. It's supposed to take about ten days to melt, but it's only the end of day 3, and this afternoon the skull was already poking out of the ice quite a bit. Maybe it was (ironically) warmer than they expected this week, leading to a faster melt. That would be a pretty great message, in my opinion. Also, in case you were wondering, the baby is about three-quarters melted at this point, we'll see how it's doing in the morning.
  
• 
• In Rådhuspladsen, a.k.a City Hall Square, there is a giant bicycle-powered globe and several temporary glass buildings which I haven't quite figured out the purpose of. Something green, I'm sure. It's on my list of things to investigate further.
• In Kongens Nytorv (The King's New Square), has been showing a photo display of "100 places to remember before they disappear." The exhibit has been there since late September, actually, but it was all in anticipation of the next couple weeks. There is a website here, which contains photos of all 100 places, as well as a description of the climate-related problems they are facing. Many of them are "naturey" landmarks, which are certainly worth protecting for the sake of biodiversity and natural beauty, but the more striking ones to me are the "human" landmarks. Pretty much every coastal city in the world is going to be flooded if the oceans rise as much as predicted. Chicago, Caracas (Venezuela), Beijing, New York, Amman (Jordan), and the entire country of The Maldives are featured in the exhibit, but that list is certainly not extensive.

Over the next two days, I'm going to have a lot of homework, but then I'm more or less done for the semester. I plan on spending my last week and a half monitoring the news closely, and attending as many lectures and exhibits as I can. In addition to the above, there is also an event called Klimaforum, which is sort of "the people's COP15." It's a series of events and lectures for those of us who can't actually attend COP15 (which is everyone). Plus Christiania is putting on their own event to celebrate visions of hope for the future. My favorite bit is that each day at 2:00PM, they're "burying" an abstract concept which hinders progress. Unfortunately, I was in class yesterday and missed out on burying The American Dream, but I'll be sure to catch a couple of the other funerals before I leave. It's looking like it's going to be an awesome couple of weeks.