UN Climate Chief Resigns

It's a start.

The U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer has resigned to join a consultancy group as an adviser, the U.N. climate secretariat said on Thursday, two months after a disappointing Copenhagen summit.

De Boer will step down on July 1 to join KPMG, the U.N. framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) said in a statement. He has led the agency since 2006.

"It was a difficult decision to make, but I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia," de Boer said in the statement.

Yes, just what academia needs is another true believer advising them. Perhaps he can work on some money-wasting projects such as this.

A disastrous series of failed climate change publicity stunts cost taxpayers £9million, it emerged yesterday.

The projects paid for by the Government’s Climate Challenge Fund did next to nothing to change public opinion, a Whitehall report found.

It said the initiatives were almost entirely preaching to the converted and that trying to drum up interest through sensationalism only put people off.

Schemes included a £40,000 DVD in which schoolchildren explained that in ten years everyone will have to wear sunglasses all the time, because the sun will be shining more.

A tent set up in shopping centres and labelled an ‘experiential climate dome’ was subsidised by Whitehall to the tune of nearly £400,000; a computer game cost £47 every time it was played; and a series of ‘challenging pub quizzes’ about climate change cost more than £85,000.

Large grants went to councils, schools and youth groups for ‘attitude modification’ programmes and to assure the public that man-made global warming is an established scientific fact.

And £200,000 went to Oxford University to ‘take climate change into the community’.
Details of the projects and the report for Ed Miliband’s Department of Energy and Climate Change – which was never published – were unearthed by the TaxPayers’ Alliance through Freedom of Information requests.

Matthew Sinclair, the group’s research director, said: ‘The Government has clearly crossed the line from public information to propaganda on climate change.

Serial fabricator Al Gore remains in seclusion and unavailable for comment.