Successive British governments have squandered huge sums of tax-payers’ money on nebulous schemes purporting to save the earth from climate change.

That the earth could or should be saved from its climate change is a ‘spiritual, religious, and philosophical view’ of a ‘belief system’, to quote from the following report.

America too has ‘invested’ enormous sums in this thing of spit and cobwebs (see our post of that title, February 3, 2010). For the Western world as a whole the expense is astronomical.

Has there ever been a waste as vast as this?

From the Telegraph, by Christopher Booker:

In all the coverage lately given to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its embattled chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri [see our post The most powerful magician the world has ever known, December 21, 2009], one rather important part of the story has largely been missed. This is the way in which, in its obsession with climate change, different branches of the UK Government have in recent years been pouring hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a bewildering array of “climate-related” projects, often throwing a veil of mystery over how much is being paid, to whom and why…

To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of “Glaciergate”, the inclusion in the IPCC’s 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story…

Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain’s claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report. …

In 2008 that Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to work in his Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), where his spurious claim was used to win Teri a share in two lucrative studies of the effects of the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. …

Why was UK taxpayers’ money being used to fund these projects?

Why in 2005, for instance, did Defra pay Teri for a study designed to help the Indian insurance industry make money out of the risks of global warming? Why was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) sponsoring a study into how Indian industry could make billions out of “carbon credits“, paid by Western firms under the bizarre UN scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism?

Typical of this curiously opaque world was a payment by Defra to fund the work of an unnamed “head of unit” on something called the IPCC Synthesis Report, of which Dr Pachauri was co-editor. This money was paid to Cambridge University (department unnamed), to be forwarded to Teri Europe, then sent on to the anonymous recipient in Delhi, whose email address was Teri India… (The IPCC itself meanwhile paid Teri a further £400,000 for its work on the Synthesis Report, although it was only 52 pages.)…

Why  have UK taxpayers shelled out £239,538 to unnamed recipients for a study of “Climate change impacts on Chinese agriculture”? Or £230,895 for a “research programme on climate change impacts in India”? Or £57,500 on the “Brazilian proposal support group”?

The largest single payment on Defra’s list, and almost the only recipient identified, was £13,315,168 given to the Hadley Centre itself for its [fraudulent, as the Climategate emails have shown] Climate Predictions Programme. This is just a tiny part of the money UK taxpayers have been contributing for years to assist the work of the IPCC: the Hadley Centre alone has been handed £179 million. …

Why should DfID have paid £30 million to assist “climate change adaptation in Africa“; or £2.5 million for the same in China?

Why in 2002 should UK taxpayers have given £200,000 to pay for delegates from developing nations to attend a “Rio Earth Summit” conference in Johannesburg, and another £120,000 for green activists to attend the same shindig – let alone £10,000 for a “WORKSHOP ON WOMEN AS SACRED CUSTODIANS OF THE EARTH”, to “explore the spiritual, religious and philosophical views concerning women and ecology and the policy implications of these belief systems”?

Only rarely do the government departments funding all these shadowy activities shout pubicly about how they are spending our money – as when last September DfID’s Douglas Alexander was happy to get publicity for flying to Delhi to give Dr Pachauri £10 million to pay for his institute to examine how India’s poverty could be reduced by “sustainable development”.

Similarly, in 2008, our then energy minister Malcolm Wicks flew to Japan to boast that the UK was “the world’s largest donor” to the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, pledging another £2.5 million of taxpayers’ money, on top of £9 million Britain had already paid into this scheme since its launch in 2003. More than one ministry is responsible for funding this programme, as when DfID pays for a “research agenda on climate change and development”, while the FCO sponsors yet another study into “clean development mechanisms”.

Contemplating the impenetrable maze of payments made by various ministries to the UN, the EU, banks, research institutes, teams of academics, NGOs, environmental and industrial lobby groups and “charitable foundations” – often through chains of “funding vehicles” which may give only the most nebulous idea of their purpose – we can get little idea what is the total amount of taxpayers’ money flooding out from all our different branches of officialdom. The ministries involved have not seemed exactly keen to help sort out all these mysteries and confusions. What does seem clear is that our Government doesn’t really want us to know all the sums involved, who many of the recipients are or why most of these payments are being made in the first place.

Man-made Global Warming was a thing built with the spit and cobwebs of cynical political manipulation and ingenuous credulity.

Warmists are struggling ever more frantically to defend their myth. No wonder. Not only reputations but whole industries have been built on it and TRILLIONS  have been invested in them. Governments have distorted economies because of it. Untold millions of people have been so convinced of it they cannot swallow the fact that it has been exposed as untrue. It is  believed in by many as a religious faith, and like any religious faith it may long continue to hold them in its spell.

The great economist Walter Williams writes about this at Investor’s Business Daily:

John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hourlong television documentary five-part series titled “Global Warming: The Other Side,” presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data in the same way as the now-disgraced and under-investigation University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. The NCDC is a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its manipulated climate data are used by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, a division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. …

Mounting evidence of scientific fraud might make little difference in terms of the response to man-made global warming hysteria. Why? Vested economic and political interests have emerged where trillions of dollars and social control are at stake. Therefore, many people who recognize the scientific fraud underlying global warming claims are likely to defend it anyway.

• Automobile companies have invested billions in research and investment in producing “green cars.”

• General Electric and Philips have spent millions lobbying Congress to outlaw incandescent bulbs so that they can force us to buy costly compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL).

• Farmers and ethanol manufacturers have gotten Congress to enact laws mandating greater use of their product, not to mention massive subsidies.

• Thousands of major corporations around the world have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions, including giants like IBM, Nike, Coca-Cola and BP, the oil company. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Dell have vowed to become “carbon neutral.”

Then there’s the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange that plans to trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a huge multitrillion-dollar financial stake in the perpetuation of the global warming fraud. Federal, state and local agencies have spent billions of dollars and created millions of jobs to deal with one aspect or another of global warming.

It’s deeper than just money. Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact there are more polar bears now than in 1950. They’ve taught children about melting glaciers.

Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that its Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to “impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

What would all the beneficiaries of the global warming hype do if it became widely known and accepted that mankind’s activities have very little to do with the Earth’s temperature? I don’t know, but a lot of people would feel and look like idiots.

I bet that even if the permafrost returned as far south as New Jersey, as it once did, the warmers and their congressional stooges would still call for measures to fight global warming.

Who would have thought it? Osama bin Laden has a better understanding of  what a ‘green economy’ would do for the United States than Obama and the Democrats.

The world’s terrorist-in-chief is all for intensifying the hysteria over climate change, and he ardently urges that draconian measures be taken to reduce ’man-made global warming’, because he clearly sees it is a sure way to destroy American wealth and power.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

In the Obama worldview, fighting climate change will “finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.”

In the Osama worldview, it will “bring the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

The president spoke those words to Congress last week during his State of the Union message; the head of al-Qaida was delivering his latest rant for broadcast to his followers.

The president and the Democrats running Congress fail to see the dangers that environmentalist extremism poses to the U.S.

But bin Laden has concluded it is a powerful weapon that can destroy us.

The Saudi-born patriarch of Islamist terrorism, from whatever cave he currently calls home, devoted his entire latest audiotape message to global warming. “Talk about climate change is not an ideological luxury but a reality,” bin Laden declared. “All of the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.” …

Environmentalist extremism has made the leap from a politically-correct fetish of leftist utopians who resent capitalists to an economic weapon highly recommended by America’s international Public Enemy No.1. …

Communists like Saul Alinksy and his disciple Barack Obama experiment with human lives. Communism is one of the atrocious religions that sacrifice children.

Heather Mac Donald writes about the fatherless children of Chicago’s black ‘communities’ that were ‘organized’ by Alinskyite ‘organizers’, notably Barack Obama.

This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time.

Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.

One year out of college, Barack Obama took a job as a community organizer, hoping for an authentic black experience that would link him to the bygone era of civil rights protest. Few people know what a community organizer is—Obama didn’t when he decided to become one—yet the term seduces the liberal intelligentsia with its aura of class struggle and agitation against an unjust establishment. Saul Alinsky, the self-described radical who pioneered the idea in Chicago’s slaughterhouse district during the Depression, defined community organizing as creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people.” Alinsky viewed poverty as a political condition: it stemmed from a lack of power, which society’s “haves” withhold from the “have-nots.” A community organizer would open the eyes of the disenfranchised to their aggrieved status, teaching them to demand redress from the illegitimate “power structure.”

Alinskyite empowerment suffered its worst scandal in 1960s Chicago. The architects of the federal War on Poverty created a taxpayer-funded version of a community-organizing entity, the so-called Community Action Agency, whose function was to agitate against big-city mayors for more welfare benefits and services for blacks. Washington poverty warriors, eager to demonstrate their radical bona fides, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into Chicago’s most notorious gangs, who were supposed to run job-training and tutoring programs under the auspices of a signature Alinskyite agency, the Woodlawn Organization. Instead, the gangbangers maintained their criminal ways—raping and murdering while on the government payroll, and embezzling federal funds to boot.

The disaster failed to dim the romance of community organizing. But by the time Obama arrived in Chicago in 1984, an Alinskyite diagnosis of South Side poverty was doubly irrelevant. Blacks had more political power in Chicago than ever before, yet that power had no impact on the tidal wave of dysfunction that was sweeping through the largest black community in the United States. Chicago had just elected Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor; the heads of Chicago’s school system and public housing were black, as were most of their employees; black power broker Emil Jones, Jr. represented the South Side in the Illinois State Senate; Jesse Jackson would launch his 1984 presidential campaign from Chicago. …

Now children are being deserted by their mothers too.

The next stage in black family disintegration may be on the horizon. According to several Chicago observers, black mothers are starting to disappear, too. “Children are bouncing around,” says a police officer in Altgeld Gardens. “The mother says: ‘I’m done. You go stay with your father.’ The ladies are selling drugs with their new boyfriend, and the kids are left on their own.” Albert’s mother lived four hours away; he was moving among different extended family members in Chicago. Even if a mother is still in the home, she may be incapable of providing any emotional or moral support to her children. “Kids will tell you: ‘I’m sleeping on the floor, there’s nothing in the fridge, my mother doesn’t care about me going to school,’ ” says Rogers Jones, the courtly founder of Roseland Safety Net Works. “Kids are traumatized before they even get to school.” Some mothers are indifferent when the physical and emotional abuses that they suffered as children recur with their own children. “We’ve had mothers say: ‘I was raped as a child, so it’s no big deal if my daughter is raped,’ ” reports Jackson. …

There was a moment when it seemed that Obama recognized what these children really needed – not organizing, not empowerment, but a stable home with married parents.

Barack Obama started that work in a startling Father’s Day speech in Chicago while running for president. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he said in 2008, “we’ll admit that . . . too many fathers [are] missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

But after implicitly drawing the connection between family breakdown and youth violence—“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child?”—Obama reverted to Alinskyite bromides about school spending, preschool programs, visiting nurses, global warming, sexism, racial division, and income inequality. And he has continued to swerve from the hard truth of black family breakdown since his 2008 speech.

The UN climate conference at Copenhagen was fortunately a failure, and the terrible consequences that might have resulted from the achievement of its impoverishing and enslaving objectives have been averted, but immeasurable damage has already been done by the propagation of the global warming lie.

Melanie Phillips writes in the Spectator:

The IPCC is now a totally discredited body which should be investigated for the mammoth fraud it has perpetrated on the world. (Questions might also be asked about New Scientist and other scientific journals which have been party to this scam).Yet on the basis of the IPCC’s anti-scientific propaganda and the hysteria it has created, the entire political landscape in Britain and elsewhere has been reshaped, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of these countries.

In Britain, any idea that the Tories might halt the country’s gathering slippage into an existential crevasse is vitiated by the leadership’s fanatical or opportunistic (take your pick) devotion to this discredited, totalitarian dogma of man-made global warming. Interestingly, according to a survey conducted by Conservative Home, the lowest priority for the 141 Tory parliamentary candidates who took part was ‘reducing Britain’s carbon footprint’. Writer Matthew Sinclair adds anxiously:

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that new candidates are ardent sceptics of climate change science or policy…’

Good heavens, perish the thought! After all, who could possibly think there was any doubt about it?

Is it possible that food could become scarce in America? It could and would become more expensive if cap-and-trade legislation is passed. The progressive elite who run the world on opinions do not think eating should have a high priority among human concerns.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

If the cap-and-trade provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill become law, you can wave goodbye to those amber waves of grain as America’s heartland falls victim to a perverse set of incentives and a process called “afforestation.” Soybeans and wheat will give way to elms and oaks. … [A] study, which was released by the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] earlier this month, reckons that as a result of cap-and-trade, farmers with energy-intensive crops would see their cost of production go up 10% over the next 50 years. Couple that with the money to be made from carbon offsets, and it may not be long before we’re unable to see the farms for the trees.

The USDA projects that under cap-and-trade … fuel costs will rise as much as 5.3% from 2012 to 2018. “The conclusion of all the studies remains the same: that cap-and-trade has the potential to devastate the agricultural community with higher energy prices,” says Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Food prices have risen worldwide as farmland has been converted to the production of energy-deficient biofuels such as ethanol. They’ll rise even further as valuable acreage is taken offline for the planting of trees to absorb the carbon dioxide that was declared to be a pollutant in need of regulation. …

When the enemy was Big Agriculture, Willie Nelson started Farm-Aid and elites lined up to save the family farm. Now, it seems, saving the planet is more important. Who really needs cheap and plentiful food when we can hug trees and get rid of all those pesky barnyard animals and their greenhouse-gas emissions in the process?

Lee Gerhard is a geologist and a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Here’s what he has to say about greenhouse gases, CO2 concentrations and effect, Arctic and Antarctic ice, polar bears, human influence on global temperature and so on (from Icecap):

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know:

• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.

• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.

• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.

• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

We also know a lot about Earth temperature changes:

• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.

• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.

• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.

• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.

• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

Contrary to many public statements:

• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.

• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.

• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.

• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.

• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.

Public announcements use a great deal of hyperbole and inflammatory language. For instance, the word “ever” is misused by media and in public pronouncements alike. It does not mean “in the last 20 years,” or “the last 70 years.” “Ever” means the last 4.5 billion years.

For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, “How long is ever?” The answer is since 1979. And then ask, “Is it still warming?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word “unprecedented” cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years. …

I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics. …

Earth’s climate has been changing throughout the billions of years of its existence. If it’s changing now more quickly, the human race will quickly adapt to the changes. We are a highly adaptable species.

The eminently sensible Nigel Lawson, who was Mrs Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, writes this (in part):

The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B.

And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement …

Beyond adaptation, plan B should involve a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.

Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

We don’t like his idea of government investment in research, since anything  government does it does badly, and anything it interferes with it spoils. If geoengineering is necessary, private enterprise will do it, and do it well.

But we delight in his drily ironic suggestion of  a ’small public investment in counseling’ for the participants who suffer ‘conference-deprivation trauma’. Here failure wouldn’t matter.

The Canadian journalist Diane Francis has written an article in the Financial Post, expressing the opinion that the whole world should adopt China’s one-child-only policy in order to reduce the world’s population.

The environmentalists hold to the view, as little fact-based as all their views tend to be, that over-population is a threat, when in fact most countries, notably all of Europe and Japan, have precisely the opposite problem: birth-rates so low that the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish, the Portuguese (all predominantly Catholic countries, note) as well as the British, the Scandinavians, the Russians, the Japanese are literally dying out.

The environmentalist view is that human beings are messy creatures, doing more harm than good to the planet. The Green vision is of a clean, nay a pure planet. In truth, their ideal could only be realized by the total elimination of the filthy human species.

Here’s what Diane Francis has to say:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate. [This is the sheerest nonsense - JB]

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.

The intelligence behind this is the following:

-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world’s population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.

-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world’s forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.

-Doing nothing, by contrast, will result in an unsustainable population of nine billion by 2050.

Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it. Medical and other scientific advances have benefited by delivering lower infant mortality rates as well as longevity. Both are welcome, but humankind has not yet recalibrated its behavior to account for the fact that especially if billions get indoor plumbing and cars.

The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world’s big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food [this has long been a popular myth on the Left - JB], and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet. [What sense can be made of this statement? - JB]

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

The point is that Copenhagen’s talking points are beside the point.

The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.

Impose, impose, impose. And because ‘over-population’ is a world problem, there must be a World Authority with the power to impose its will on every single one of us. Totalitarianism on a scale that Lenin could only have dreamed of.

This is neo-Malthusianism. Human beings are not as Malthus or this lady imagines them.

Diane Francis’s article is typical of the thinking of the Left. It is sociological. Sociology is a collectivist idea, a way of seeing people merely as units of a species.

The sociological, leftist, Green view is anti-human, chiming harmoniously with the view of the Communist Chinese government that Diane Francis praises. The naturally dictatorial Greens (including Barack Obama’s adviser, Cass Sunstein) are all for forced sterilization and forced abortion to solve a non-existent problem of over-population. They surely have no objection to another Communist Chinese method of keeping the population down: the murder, usually by exposure and neglect, of millions of babies born alive, most of them girls.

It should never be forgotten that every human being is a repository of meaning, the only meaning there is in the known universe. Every human being is a world. No two are the same.

A critical mass of humanity is needed before you get your innovators, your geniuses, and all of us, even the foolish and the mad among us, can make our contributions.