Climate meeting in London

Event 1: How to find 100 billion USD ?
One of the importat breakthroughs during the conference on climate change in Copenhagen was an agreement that in 2020 developed countries will provide $ 100 billion annually to climate-projects in developing countries. The money will be allocated to emissions control and climate adaptation.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently named members of a high-level advisory group on mobilizing Climate Change Resources. The group is led by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Gordon Brown of Britain.

Money is one of the most important and difficult issues in the climate change negotiations. The unanswered question is how the find the $ 100 billion annually to climate-projects in developing countries. This challenge must be solved if there is going to be a new international climate agreement. The financial crisis has not made this task any easier.Tomorrow the 19 people in this high-level advisory group will meet in London to try to find a solution.

From the USA comes Lawrence H. Summers, president Barack Obama's principal economic adviser. From China comes Deputy Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao. India, Brazil and South Africa are included - and of course Mexico, who will host the next major climate meeting. Among the members are also the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, the economist Nicholas Stern and investor George Soros.

In reality, Ban Ki-moon set up a forum for negotiations outside of the official climate negotiations. Agreement between the countries in the group, will lay the foundation for unity in the formal UN negotiations.

Event 2: First high-energy collisions carried out in Geneva

The first high-energy collisions between particle beams have taken place at the Large Hadron Collider, ending more than a year of frustration for scientists in Geneva.

Collisions occurred just after noon BST, five hours after scheduled, but well within the time frame expected by scientists at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN).

"This is a major breakthrough. We are going where nobody has been before. We have opened a new territory for physics,” said Oliver Buchmueller, one of the key figures on the project.

The atomic particles smashed together in head-on collisions, with each beam having an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts, three times the previous record. By creating ultra-high energy collisions, scientists are mimicking the conditions moments after the Big Bang.

"It's a great day to be a particle physicist," said Professor Rolf Heuer, the director-general of CERN. "A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication is starting to pay dividends."

Link to CNN.com

Progress: The snow is melting
Still no word from the subcontractor who has been measuring the heatloss from the ventilationsystem in the attic. Now that the outside temperature is above 0C every day - we will of course not see icicles until next year, but I still hope that they will improve the isolation of the pipes as they have promised. Not only will it hopefully reduce the icicles problem, but it will also improve the overall energy efficiency of our "Jahus" (more heat reaches the livingroom).

I do not want to accept the proposal to move the heatpump (which will cost me ca 1000 USD) until the other issues have been solved.