Words, of course, have meaning well beyond dictionary definitions. Take the word "deniers." Rather than simply describing anyone who denies something, it has become inextricably linked in the public mind with those racist idiots who deny the historical fact of the Holocaust.

National Affairs Claire Hoy Which brings us - perhaps to your surprise - to greenhouse gas emissions and the environment.

It shouldn't. But unfortunately a growing number of environmental zealots - secure in their faith that there is no room for doubting the "science" of man-made global warming - are referring to the "skeptics" as "global warming deniers."

For example, Pulitzer Prize-winning American syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, recently wrote in the Boston Globe: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future."

Imagine arguing that global warming critics are the moral equivalent of those who deny the murder of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others. Until recently, environmentalists discredited critics by accusing them of being paid apologists for oil companies and other corporations. oil companies and other corporations. Canada's own environmental saint David Suzuki, an expert at dissing corporate interests, claims that if Canada doesn't meet the commitments of the Kyoto Accord we'll be viewed as "international outlaws." But the David Suzuki Foundation itself accepted donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, as well as ATCO Gas, Alberta's principle distributor of natural gas, and other pension funds including the OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees' and Pensioners' Charity Trust. OPG, one of the world's largest electricity suppliers, operates five fossil fuel-burning generation plants and three nuclear plants. But what's good for the goose, apparently, isn't good for the gander.

Despite what environmentalists say - and, alas, Prime Minister Stephen Harper now appears to have signed on - water vapour, not humans, produces about 97 per cent of greenhouse effect. John Leeson, a director of the Calgary-based Friends of Science, says in Western Standard magazine, that Canada produces roughly two per cent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, so that even if you believe the oft-repeated claim that carbon dioxide is the chief culprit, Canada would have virtually no impact on the global greenhouse gases even if

October 10 election race we stopped burning fossil fuels entirely.

But the environmental issue is far more about politics than it is about science.

Until recently, Harper had the guts - and the integrity - to point that out. No more. Faced with polls showing Canadians are supposedly staying up at night fretting about the doomsday scenario, Harper is trying to out-green the Green Party and all the other prophets of the new religion of environmentalism.

You may recall Project Green, an $80-billion, 35- year program announced by the previous Liberal government as their solution to global warming? Like everything else the Liberals announced on this file, they didn't do much about it. But had they - at least according to a study of the plan by the C.D. Howe Institute - it would have cost more than five per cent of our Gross National Product and without lowering greenhouse gases at all.

So you don't like the C.D. Howe Institute

because it's - dare we say it? - because it's - dare we say it? - "right-wing?" O.K. Never mind what Liberals said. Look at what they did. Dion signed the Kyoto Accord, committing us to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to six per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. But during 13 years under Liberal rule our emissions actually rose more than 30 percent above 1990 levels. reality did not stop Dion and his

But that dismal reality did not stop Dion and his Liberals from joining forces with the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois to approve a private member's bill from Quebec Liberal MP Pablo Rodriquez demanding a one-third reduction in CO2 emissions within the next five years, an absurdly irresponsible position which, even if it were possible - which it isn't - would virtually guarantee a precipitous national economic collapse.

Indeed, so radical is the Rodriquez bill that commentators from many news outlets previously sympathetic to the end-of-the-world frenzy, now realize that Dion has made an enormous tactical error. To cite Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert, never a true believer, Dion has "turned his green armour into a straitjacket."

With enemies like Dion, Harper doesn't need any more friends. Nor does he need to bankrupt our economy to comply with a massive propaganda campaign which relies on old-fashioned fear-mongering over intelligent debate to scare people into compliance.

Ask yourself: If scientific predictions about global warming and climate change covering the next century and beyond are to be treated as the new gospel, why can't they get the five-day forecast right most of the time?