On December 20th, it wasn't just the Bella Centre that journalists turned their backs on, but climate change as a whole came to suffer a similar neglect too. Ever since the end of the conference that the whole word was watching, there's been a slow but steady decline in media coverage. I'm not at all surprised, today's news is tomorrow's chip paper after all. What I am surprised by, however, is what - of all things - has brought it back into the public consciousness...

What with this week's rumblings of a coup at Number 10, you'd have thought that British journalists would be having a field day. But no, what's got everyone in the country talking is the snow. And whilst we Brits love nothing better than to chit-chat endlessly about the weather, I've noticed that the once inane natter has taken quite a serious turn. This week I've heard people talking about 'global warming', and 'climate change' more than ever before. Somehow a two-week, multi-million dollar conference passed many people by, but a bit of snow has done the trick - and at last got people talking about climate change.

Where are those tree-hugging climate-change loving hippies now huh?... wrote one of my facebook friends...  we should be having conferences encouraging global warming! ... Whilst I am fairly sure that she was joking, it was whilst reading the responses generated by her comment that I realised something rather serious: All the conferences in the world couldn't make people pay attention, or care, let alone believe in climate change. It was, for most people, a distant and unquantifiable entity. But now that we in the UK (and elsewhere) are beginning to experience abnormal weather - whatever its cause - people are sitting up and starting to pay attention, even if just for a moment, and ask what's going on?