For those of you who are still naive enough to believe that the great Copenhagen climate conference isn't just a massive financial shakedown of western economies, consider the walkout on Monday by a group of developing nations.

Led by China and India - two of the world's worst polluters - they brought negotiations to a halt (which, it says here, is a positive thing) when they demanded that the developed countries commit to deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Never mind that China alone is opening two coal-fired plants each week - that's right, two each week. And India isn't far behind.

Yet these countries and others are demanding that the evil west not only cut back on our economies but send vast amounts of cash their way for what they claim is the harm that our economic prosperity has done to their environment.

It's such a blatant attempt to blackmail the west, that if our leaders had the guts - they don't - they should just turn around and come back home again.

But U.S. President Barrack Obama, having spent a good part of the year traveling around the globe apologizing on behalf of his own country - which at least partially accounts for his plunging popularity at home - is riding into town with promises to make dramatic cuts in the U.S. industry, cuts that he can't possibly deliver given the fact that, unlike the Canadian system, the president doesn't just get to snap his fingers and watch the congress and senate snap into line. It ain't gonna happen.

But Obama, rather than looking at the fraud revealed in the so-called "settled science" in the recent climategate revelations, is more inclined to have the ear of former vice-president Al Gore, a man who has made himself into a billionaire by pedaling fear and loathing for his own benefit.

This is the same Gore who came to Toronto recently and told the adoring editorial board at the Toronto Star that the entire fate of the universe - our very existence as the human race - depends upon shutting down the much-maligned Alberta oil sands project.

Just how stupid is this claim?

Well, even if you take the worst possible view of the oil sands - neglecting the economic benefits (to Alberta as well as to all Canadians) - the fact is that the oil sands account for one-tenth of one per cent of all global emissions.

So how can such a project hold the fate of the universe in its' hands?

This is the kind of absurdity which the doomsday prophets of climate change have been pushing for years and, alas, much of the media has been uncritically reporting and supporting such nonsense.

James Hansen, for example, a scientist who is Gore's main mentor on these matters, even went to far - or so low - as to compare the trains that transport coal to power plants (the ones in the west apparently, not the ones in China) to the "death trains" that took Jews to the Nazi death camps

under Hitler.

If anybody else had said such a thing about any topic other than the sainted global warming issue, they would have been quite properly dismissed as ignorant jerks.

But hey, this is the fate of the world at stake, so any exaggeration, nomatter how vile, is okay just as so long as the heart of the speaker is in the right place.

For those whose hearts are not in the right place, well, the weather prophets just dismiss them as "deniers," another term which had hitherto been reserved for those bigots who continue to deny the Holocaust.

As for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one of the few world leaders who actually has a healthy sense of skepticism about all this nonsense, he continues to be pilloried by the global warming zealots and their fellow travelers in the media for not doing enough to shut down Canada's economy ostensibly to fight something which is based as much on a particular left-wing ideology as it is on pure science.

Here again, while Canada is singled out as the biggest bad guy among all the other bad guys, Canada produces two per cent - yes, that's right, two per cent - of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, not even in the same league as China and India, both of whom are portrayed as victims of western imperialism and neither of whom (along with Russia, another leading polluter) has the slightest desire to cut do anything but profit from what it hopes will be western guilt.

Even Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty - who talks the talk about cutting back but fails to walk the walk - has joined the chorus of those attacking Harper, apparently unaware (or unconcerned) about the economic impact such cutbacks would have on an economy which McGuinty has already helped decline dramatically.

It's enough to make a grown man cry. Either that, or go into the garden and eat worms.