Amid the strife of the Copenhagen climate summit, one area of acknowledged progress was in ways to help preserve tropical forests and their vast stores of carbon in developing countries.

Sometimes the numbers just don’t add up, even when you know they need to. Attendees at the Copenhagen meeting got a taste of that as the massive meeting struggled to accommodate its guests.

A year after she was finishing a two-year appointment at NCAR, Mercy Borbor Córdova was literally on the world stage, serving as a delegate from Ecuador at the Copenhagen climate summit.

At first glance, the Copenhagen conference seemed like an alternate universe—enormous, byzantine, and riddled with customs and folkways that weren’t at all obvious to someone who’s never been to such a meeting.

There was a palpable sense of history in the making across Europe as some 15,000 expected participants in the Copenhagen climate conference began to converge upon the Continent.