Imagine you’re a well-to-do person attending a dinner of your peers. The food is top-rate and there’s plenty of it. Course after course is laid upon the table.

A group of less-advantaged people has been watching from the sidelines. When the dinner is done, you invite them to join you at the table. After the restaurant staff has served coffee, the bill comes. You and your rich peers insist that everyone now at the table must share in paying the entire bill.

Connie Hedegaard, the Danish Minister of Climate Change, resigned as the President of the COP meetings and was replaced by the Danish Prime Minister. The official line was that because negotiations are now at a head of state level, the president needed to be a head of state as well. But rumours were floating around that Connie disagreed with the approach being taken by developed countries; however, she insists she continues to facilitate informal negotiations.

The prospects of a deal dimmed somewhat this morning. The Group of 77 countries have walked out of all the negotiating meetings, causing a further suspension in talks. They are unhappy that a group of 40 ministers from wealthy countries met privately all day Sunday to hash out a way forward and that the texts are not sufficiently ambitious. Reports of responses from the negotiating rooms to this action this morning indicate a high level of frustration. I am currently in the Plenary Room and the negotiating teams from all the countries are standing in small groups talking animatedly.

The mood in Copenhagen after the arrests of almost 400 people was a bit more polarized today. There were no official events at the United Nations Forum on Sunday but plenty of activity around town. I went to the industry event called "Bright Green" -- a forum on technological solutions to climate change and also to the activist's shadow forum called Klimaforum.

Copenhagen Observations:

The greenhouse gas emission cuts advocated by the Mikhail Gorbachev’s Climate Change Task Force (CCTF) are aggressive – a stabilization of emissions in five years, a reduction of 45-50 percent in the next 10 years and a virtually carbon-free global economy by mid-century.

Those goals are in line with the cuts leading climate scientists say are necessary to avoid the worst consequences of global warming, but they are far ahead of the reductions being proposed so far by major polluters such as the United States and Europe.

Most diplomatic affairs at the international level are carefully scripted and choreographed under the principle of “no surprises”.

That is not the case in Copenhagen at the international negotiations on global climate change. By only the third day in the two-week conference, there were several surprises and promises of more.

Again today, Tuvalu has caused a deadlock in the plenary discussion, and many countries have supported their demand for a substantive discussion on a legally binding convention to be signed at this meeting. The deadlock is between Group of 77 countries which traditionally vote as a block because Tuvalu's proposal opens the door to discussing legally binding commitments for southern countries as well as northern countries, in addition to more significant reductions for industrialised countries.

Grist's list of 15 people to watch at Copenhagen: click here to read more.