THE ACTIVISTS:THE MARATHON negotiations to strike a deal on global climate change may be freighted with gravity and profound implications.
But as a spectacle, the process itself in the cavernous Bella Centre on the outskirts of Copenhagen proceeds at a tortoise-like pace.
You must leave the main area for one of the satellite halls, or even endure the subzero, snowy wastes of Denmark in midwinter if you want to find some levity and entertainment.
There you encounter stands and brochures for every imaginable cause; meet the representatives from some of the tiniest and endangered nations on earth, often wearing colourful traditional costume; and meet all the protesters with their various attention-seeking tricks and stunts.
Besides Yvo de Boer’s polished press conference the best performance of the day happens around teatime in the exhibition hall.
There activists with Climate Action Network have set up a mini stage. Towards the conclusion of each day’s talks they offer a “Fossil of the Day” award.
Yesterday the mock-ceremony honoured Australia, for trying to bully tiny Tuvalu to drop its insistence that global temperature rise no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In the vast hall surrounding the performance are hundreds of stands, dripping with information.
If you want to find out about the UN convention to combat desertification, about the “green wall” planned for Africa, or how satellites in space monitor climate change, you’ll find it here.
It’s like a Google search come to life – in other words, an uncontrollable avalanche of excessive information.
Outside you bump into well-mannered campaigners trying to persuade the whole universe to go 100 per cent vegan, or protesters who chant or froth about what they see as immoral compromises. Some dress up for the occasion.
One of the most noticeable fancy-dressers was a guy walking around in a polar bear costume. It turned out to be Phelim McAleer, the Irish journalist and film-maker who has challenged the consensus view on climate change.
He’s in Copenhagen this week trying to shoot a short film, Phil and Me.
It’s his effort to track down Phil Jones, the former head of the climatic research unit in East Anglia University who resigned over a controversy about leaked e-mails. This is his version of Michael Moore’s iconic Roger and Me.
McAleer has confronted dozens of delegates and participants at this week’s conference on film. “People are talking about me being a climate change denier. The real deniers are the people who do not want to talk about these e-mails,” he said.
McAleer also says he was attacked by an environmentalist during a live interview he was giving to Fox News at the conference. A salad box was thrown, hitting him on the head.
He also tried to ask Al Gore a question about the East Anglia e-mail controversy but the former US vice-president kept on walking. Still, McAleer says, the encounter was worth it: already it has had 330,000 hits on YouTube.
Asked about his reputation as a contrarian and about corporate funding for his projects, he replied that he was a sceptical journalist.
He also said no corporations had funded any of his movie projects.
