Copenhagen

T he global warming debate is at a crossroads, with a skeptical American public already rising up against a cap-and-trade scheme that would send energy prices through the roof, a whistle-blower at the influential Climate Research Unit revealing that the temperature data used to make the case for global warming were badly manipulated, predictions of yet another cold winter, and the fact it has been nearly a decade since global temperatures stopped rising....

President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, had this to say at the end of the rough-and-tumble climate talks in Copenhagen this month: "I think we're winning more than we're losing." Really? How? Diplomats had just failed to produce a binding treaty to control global warming in any meaningful way. But maybe Mr. Holdren's right. I attended the climate conference myself, representing Marylanders concerned about sea-level rise and the need for clean energy. And I think - just maybe - we did win more than we lost in Copenhagen.

- By brokering a climate deal in Copenhagen a week ago, President Barack Obama has committed himself to a more daunting task: pushing for comprehensive climate legislation in the Senate next year. Although many senators, especially key Republicans, have shown little appetite for backing yet another ambitious bill in the aftermath of the polarizing health care debate, it is clear that enacting legislation to cap the U.S. carbon dioxide output and allow polluters to trade emission permits is essential to delivering on the pledges that Obama made to other world leaders.

WASHINGTON - - By brokering a climate deal in Copenhagen a week ago, President Barack Obama has committed himself to a more daunting task: pushing for comprehensive climate legislation in the Senate next year. Although many senators, especially key Republicans, have shown little appetite for backing yet another ambitious bill in the aftermath of the polarizing health care debate, it is clear that enacting legislation to cap the U.S. carbon dioxide output and allow polluters to trade emission permits is essential to delivering on the pledges that Obama made to other world leaders.

Last week, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama went to Copenhagen to make a pitch for Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid. The capital of Denmark has never been host to an Olympics, but Nordic neighbors Norway and Sweden have welcomed the world's athletes. This cosmopolitan city's appeal extends beyond the sporting type. Here are five things to do: 1 See the Little Mermaid. : If you're expecting to see Denmark's Statue of Liberty, keep in mind that this is a small country. Appropriately, Den Lille Havfrue, as she's known in Danish, is a small statue, slightly less than life-size, that pays homage to the character created by Hans Christian Andersen.

Atomic physics, quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, complementarity. You might expect these subjects to come up at the Johns Hopkins University - but not on stage at a community theater. And yet, what better community theater to tackle Michael Frayn's devilishly complex Tony Award-winning play, Copenhagen, than Theatre Hopkins? A play that tests the mettle even of accomplished professional actors, Copenhagen is receiving an impressively skillful production under Suzanne Pratt's direction.

Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's 2000 Tony Award-winning play about a mysterious 1941 meeting between Nobel Prize-winning physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, begins a monthlong run at Washington's Kennedy Center Tuesday. Len Cariou stars as the Danish Bohr, opposite Hank Stratton as the German Heisenberg. Mariette Hartley plays Bohr's wife, Margrethe. Michael Blakemore, who won a Tony for his direction, serves as the director here. Show times at the Kennedy Center are 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with matinees at 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through March 24. Tickets are $20-$68.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- There are no street signs in this neighborhood of Copenhagen, but you don't need one to find the most infamous street in Christiania.You can't miss "Pusher's Street." Enter the so-called "Free City" of Christiania through the brightly painted red-and-yellow arch, and in moments the pushers will be swarming around you like flies."Hashish? Hashish?" they beckon from either side of the dirt street that is notorious throughout Scandinavia. About 20 pushers were out on the street one recent Monday morning, vigorously waving their hard bricks of hashish, which, although technically illegal in Denmark, is plentiful in this community of 1,000.

An impatient "Are we going to have a whole season of this kind of stuff?" to a delighted "I love Michael Frayn!" was overheard at intermission of Copenhagen in the lobby of Colonial Players. I, however, was with the ambivalent majority of theatergoers who attended the production's opening weekend. Even Director Darice Clewell confessed in her program notes that after multiple readings and viewing two different productions, she "was not very interested in seeing Copenhagen again." Only after reviewing the script a fourth time did this work appeal to her. Clewell realized, she wrote, that "Colonial Players' stage provides a fourth dimension - depth, and our oval playing space evokes the classic model of an electron's orbit."

President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, had this to say at the end of the rough-and-tumble climate talks in Copenhagen this month: "I think we're winning more than we're losing." Really? How? Diplomats had just failed to produce a binding treaty to control global warming in any meaningful way. But maybe Mr. Holdren's right. I attended the climate conference myself, representing Marylanders concerned about sea-level rise and the need for clean energy. And I think - just maybe - we did win more than we lost in Copenhagen.

Heaping praise on the "breakthrough" achieved at climate change talks in Copenhagen, as President Barack Obama did last week, may seem an awkward overstatement at best, but it's just as wrong to mischaracterize the United Nations conference as an outright failure. Rather, it achieved modest progress and represents a hopeful step toward the kind of binding global agreement that is alleged to be the goal of all involved. Is anyone shocked that the meeting did not produce an ironclad deal?

The global warming debate is at a crossroads, with a skeptical American public already rising up against a cap-and-trade scheme that would send energy prices through the roof, a whistle-blower at the influential Climate Research Unit revealing that the temperature data used to make the case for global warming were badly manipulated, predictions of yet another cold winter, and the fact it has been nearly a decade since global temperatures stopped rising....

The pace at which the world's glaciers are melting can't hold a candle to the rate at which public acceptance of climate change is losing ground. Two years ago, about 7 out of 10 Americans linked greenhouse gases to global warming, but today it's closer to a 50-50 split. There are any number of reasons for this, ranging from the "inconvenience" of climate change policy during an economic recession to the growing partisan divide over the science of it. The fact that Republicans willingly nominated a presidential candidate in 2008 whose position on climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions was not much different from his Democratic opponent's seems largely forgotten today.