On one hand while they say “Failure is not an option in Copenhagen” it appears that some things aren’t going so well internally. Perhaps a bit too much wining and dining?
As WUWT commenter “par5” points out: “Becker has left office with immediate effect after not presenting sufficient documentation for expensive restaurant bills, according to reports in the Danish media. One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine, and Becker was given a formal warning in March over travel expenses.”
http://www.rechargenews.com/business_area/politics/article195681.ece
From the COP15 website:
Denmark’s chief climate negotiator resigns
Thomas Becker, right hand of incoming COP15 president Connie Hedegaard, has been relieved of duty with immediate notice.
With less than two months to go to the UN climate conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark’s chief climate negotiator Thomas Becker has resigned from his position as deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry for Climate and Energy.
According to Danish news agency Ritzau, Becker confirms his resignation but declines to comment or give any reason for his resignation.
“Of course it’s sad that a key person in the climate negotiations has chosen to resign his position. However, it is a purely administrative matter which I therefore do not have any comments to,” says Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy and incoming COP15 president, according to Danish public service broadcasting network DR.
DR on Friday quoted the ministry’s Permanent Secretary Thomas Egebo as saying that “Thomas Becker has been relieved from duty with immediate notice after disagreements of a non-professional nature, matters that the ministry and Becker look differently upon”.
Becker has been instrumental in Hedegaard’s international climate diplomacy, and according to Ritzau he conceived the idea of bringing COP15 to Denmark. From 2004-2006 he was chairman of the Subsidiary Body of Implementation under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
As of Monday, Becker will be replaced by Steffen Smidt, deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Smidt is an experienced diplomat and has participated in international climate negotiations for a number of years.
h/t to WUWT reader John Ratcliffe
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“Friday’s Danish headlines suggested he left in protest and in rage over internal disagreements, and that Becker is the victim of a power struggle between the prime minister’s office and the climate ministry.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/11/792009/-On-the-Road-to-Copenhagen:-Part-3:-Architect-of-COP15-leaves-chief-negotiator-post-
http://politiken.dk/klima/klimapolitik/article806951.ece
http://www.information.dk/206847
http://jp.dk/indland/article1846403.ece
Discord is nothing new. But all too often sceptic websites and people like Benny Peiser gloat about it, and then in the end the climate regulation has crept ever further into our lives.
I say stop the disillusioned wishful thinking and face the future. Here it is:
and
Learn it, and get used to singing it -every morning when you get up!
UK Sceptic you’ve got there so fast! Well done you, et al.
Since turning 40 I signed up to the “grump old man” club. Since turning 50, I enlisted in the “grumy old synical B£$^%!D” club. Tell, me, is it possible that there is going to be an Olympics style competition every 4 years or so to see who can hold the next Climate Change Conference, probably dependant upon a country’s carbon credits allocation or some such, & how much wine they can get the community (err,….sorry taxpayer) to fork out for? I think we’re seeing the whole shooting match for what it really is, a political jolly for eco-nazis & politicians alike at taxpayers’ expense, jetting around the world for weeks at a time to “exoctic” locations, (for either direction of viewpoint, we all fall into the trap of thinking somewhere else is exotic compared to where we live until the novelty wears off!), & coming up with ridiculous fudge agreements to justify their shinanigans!
Whether it takes 1 year or 10 years, it’ll be here.
Stopping it for a day isn’t enough. We have to push back into the pit it frown where it crawled out of.
Yes, Dear Leader Obama, Prince of Peace, will take us there.
It would depend on which red wine, I guess, but a bottle each doesn’t sound totally OTT.
Of course, if they had purchased Purakanui Vineyard Estates pinot noir and one of the three Purakanui Brewing and Distilling Company gin varieties (they actually exist) it would have been a modest bill and no cause for concern. As a matter of fact, these are never sold, only ever given away, but you have to be a WUWT positive contributor or a close friend to acquire these goodies – and you have to be here to get them.
Seriously, though, this is a pretext. There is either gross financial misappropriation, gross moral turpitude (if it still exists) or a Damascan revelation for a few bottles of plonk to be the excuse to require departure. Who knows, but option one is possible and option three to be hoped for. It would mean yet another warmista has seen the light. I’m sure there’s more to come!
Let me write that up again:
Whether it takes 1 year or 10 years, it’ll get here.
Stopping it for a day isn’t enough. We have to push the Beast back into the pit from where it crawled out of:
So call your senators, and insist you don’t want to be singing socialist hymns!
Defeated after the ‘March across the Belts’ or is that after a few ‘belts’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_across_the_Belts
Global Cooling just doesn’t sit well with Denmark does it?
Thirty seven bottles of wine? Becker ought to move to the UK where his frugality would be most welcome (by the taxpayers at least).
In my experience, it is not the cost of wine per se so much as the veritable army of French Waiters require to un-cork the stuff and carefully pour it into my newly cleaned Moat without disturbing the Carp.
Maybe they have woken up that having a global climate change conference in Denmark in a cold winter is not the best idea. It might have looked good a few years ago when the world was warming, but now it looks like a stupid idea.
37 bottles of wine and 41 gin and tonics. Sounds like a normal summer BBQ at my house. However, I pay the booze from my own pocket.
First frost of this winter in Copenhagen this night. hehe
Early.
37 bottles of wine on the wall, 37 bottles of wiine
You take one down, pass it around, 36 bottles of wine on the wall…
I used to think they were stupid, now I am convinced they know very well what a fraud they have embarked on.
As someone who voted No in the Lisbon Treaty referendum here in Ireland, it was exactly this kind of behaviour I was voting against. The EU parliament voted to have an audit on their expenses kept hidden from the public, not so long ago.
There will have to be an audit of all these climate change shenanigans. Not just the money being spent on delivering ever scarier projections, but all this other money being spent by politicians and civil servants on travel and other expenses to discuss it, the bureaucracy that’s going to be required to enforce all the new regulations, and all the unintended consequences that will arise as a result of this, like compensating third world countries for “climate change”, like all the class action suits that are going to happen, because with something like this, everybody can show themselves to be “victims” of climate change.
From now on,. any spare time that I have will be studying Chinese, and researching the immigration policies of countries in the Far East, because we here in the West, have completely lost the plot.
Lokk on the bright side. If the climate does warm up, then the grapes will grow even better and wine will drop in price.
“… One bill for 39 people allegedly included 37 bottles of red wine,…”
If the 38 people with Becker were teetotalers, then I’d say Becker might have a slight drinking problem.
As others have noted with elected and unelected “officials” with their taxpayer funded nosebags firmly attached, it won’t make any difference. Guy Fawkes had the right idea, so too did the French in the late 18th century. There really is only one way (For the short to medium term that is) to solve this. Warm weather, cold weather, won’t matter.
“…and has participated in international climate negotiations for a number of years…”
How does one negotiate with the climate?
Think of all the carbon dioxide expelled by the yeasts fermenting those 37 bottles of wine. Is Becker so morally bankrupt that is flaunts his complete disregard of the environment by subsidizing the production of a scientifically proven green house gas?
How about a bit of ‘performance-related pay’ for these IPCCers, eh?
I say, to show how much they know about arctic ice, that they make bets 11 months in advance as to the next ice minimum in September 2010, and their 2010/11 pay is entirely dependent on how accurately they predict it.
If we get some spread betting exchange to draw up the terms and conditions, say they get nothing if they are more than 20% out, 50% if they are more than 10% out and 100% if they are within 5%, that would be about fair, eh?
Of course, they are allowed to modify their prediction in the light of a significant ‘event’. These include: volcanoes; big shift in el Nino; big shift in jet stream; big shift in the solar wind; anything else??
I wonder how much we global taxpayers would save in THAT scenario, eh??
Actually we have a very smart Climate Minister, who has known the weakness of AGW theory all along.
On TV she said: Well even if the theory (CO2) should turn out wrong, we have done a good job on exploring alternative sources of energy!
Not at all spoken like a true Believer……
F Rasmin,
and then they’ll tax it.
Tom writes ” It’s just a chance for a bunch of meglomaniac busybody boffins”
It amazes me how words change meanings over the years. When Robert Watson-Watt first wrote “The Natural History of the Boffin Bird”, during WWII, the word “boffin” was used as a compliment. Now apparently it is derogatory.
Barry Foster (00:55:10) :
OT. Does anyone know how I can get the Met Office’s Winter Forecast for the UK? Their site isn’t working right, never mind their predictions. I would have thought that it would have been issued by now as last year’s laughingly inaccurate one was issued in September. Anyone know?
Last time I looked (tend not to these days as it tends to be the same old clap-trap that they dish out), it was the same as last year – it was issued this September, “as mild or milder than previous years). Not terribly informative or imaginative either. I think they just recycle this every year so that statistically they can be right! Time will tell. Mind you if Deep Thought is up & running their predictions will be even more accurate, until it goes wrong of course.
“The council of Copenhagen” brings to my mind the “Council of Constance” in the beginning of the 1400s, when the church gathered to establish its primacy and infallibility. In a decree on the church infallibility it is stated “…Catholic church…it has power immediately from Christ; and that everyone of whatever state or dignity, even papal, is bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith”.
Change the church for the AGW movement, Christ for IPCC and the pope for Al Gore (?) and you will have the Copenhangen declaration.