Potty Peer Monckton makes ass of himself again and gets thrown out of business luncheon at the Ritz Carlton in Cancún

Monckton crashes Cancún business lunch, gets kicked out

Lord Christopher Monckton is asked to leave corporate lunch party after airing his sceptical views on climate change

Last year Lord Monckton called US students "Hitler Youth" at the Copenhagen climate summit. Photograph: youtube

The Caribbean sun was shining, the talk was of carbon prices, profits and enterprise and 400 of the world's most successful green corporate executives were nibbling salmon and prawns in Cancún's glitzy Ritz Carlton hotel. But then the protest began.

This was not peasant farmers or Greenpeace hanging from the roof, but the impeccably dressed British climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton. Holding forth in the centre of the UN climate conference lunch party, he claimed that man-made climate change was not happening and businesses should hesitate before investing in green energy.

A heated debate on climate change between the Guardian's environment editor John Vidal and Lord Christopher Monckton Link to this audio

Most people steered clear, but Monckton had no hesitation in barging in on conversations, reeling off statistics and arguments that, he said, proved not only that the world was not warming but that "certain newspapers" were not reporting the reality.

But it seems that the man who in Copenhagen last year compared young protesters to Hitler Youth because they gatecrashed a meeting of climate sceptics, had not actually been invited to the largest business conference of the summit that featured Lord Stern, Richard Branson and several Mexican billionaires.

After an hour of tolerating Monckton, the patience of the organisers wore thin. "Who is this man?" asked one American green venture capitalist. "These are weird views," said another. A few minutes later he was asked to leave. Surprisingly, considering Cancún is so close to the US, such climate sceptics have been all but absent at the UN meeting. The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a US free-market thinktank that used to take money from oil companies, had a small stand in the non-government group halls, but otherwise it is a sceptic-free zone. Opinions were sharply divided over the reasons for their absence from the public arena. One group of people believe that they have no appetite for a fight and have exhausted themselves; another says that they are holding their guns for better sport later. Both opinions will, of course, be fiercely contested.

Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/dec/07/cancun-monckton-crashes-business-lunch