BROADCASTS.com

It's been a beautiful autumn here in Denmark.\xa0 Warm, with golden sun, blue skies, red and yellow and orange leaves on the trees.\xa0 Just gorgeous.\xa0 And unusually warm for Denmark. It's always exciting when, instead of wearing your winter coat every day from October to April, you can wear it every day from November to April.

\xa0But this unusually pleasant weather can\u2019t help but spark conversation about global warming. \xa0So far the biggest impact climate change has had in Denmark are some severe rainstorms, when end up flooding a lot of basements and overwhelming a lot of sewer systems.\xa0 It\u2019s intriguing to think that plumbers may become the great heroes of the twenty-first century.

Danes care about climate change, and they\u2019ve made a business specialty of green technology, or what they like to call clean technology.\xa0 Cleantech.\xa0 It sells windmills to create windpower, and burns most of its household garbage in an environmentally friendly way, to create home heating.

Danes care about the environment because they care about nature.\xa0 Less than a hundred years ago, Denmark was a mostly agricultural country, and Danes still feel close to the land. \xa0Children in Denmark are constantly being taken out into whatever forests or meadows are nearby \u2013 in the cities, they pack them onto buses and trains to go get the forest experience.\xa0 There\u2019s even something called forest kindergarten for children age 3 to 6.\xa0 If you go to a forest kindergarten, you\u2019re out in the woods every day, hot or cold, rain or shine.

So it's ironic, given this love for the Earth and the environment, that the Danes were recently named the world\u2019s fourth biggest polluters, per capita, by the World Wildlife Fund. \xa0Only three Middle Eastern countries. \u2013 Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, were worse. \xa0