So Copenhagen failed; the leaders of our planet had two years in which to prepare a document to bring planet earth back from the extinction it faced if no binding agreement to cut down on CO₂ emissions were reached; they failed.
To the Danish city went 15,000 delegates, 5,000 journalists, more than 100 world leaders - on emission-spewing aircraft (including 140 private planes) into emission-spewing taxis and £650 nightly hotel rates.
I share with the US President an ignorance about science, but he has experts to brief him on global warming - and they have peers to rely on, among these, some who have been caught out in what has been called 'the worst scientific scandal of our generation'.
By now, you will all have heard about 'Climategate' - even Gordon Brown has. This is an unlikely reason for him to call anybody gobsmacked by the goings-on at the discredited Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, "flat-earthers".
The accusation suggests that its author is in denial, an acc-usation normally hurled at sceptics; but these are abnormal times because the CRU boys are a group of scientists who, and I quote Christopher Booker, "have for years been influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming, not least through the role they play at the heart of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)".
The head of CRU, Prof. Philip Jones, and his team of scientists, among whom a Dr Keith Briffa, have for years concealed background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
Last summer, according to Booker, Jones made the startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had got "lost". E-mails hacked from the CRU's computer set-up advised colleagues to delete large chunks of data. Why would the CRU do that?
Worse; data was manipulated "to point in only one desired direction - to lower past temperatures and to adjust recent temperatures upwards in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming", worse still, a ruthless determination to silence any expert questioning these findings - stifling scientific debate.
I repeat, in case there is any thermo maniac out there who thinks I am anti-GW out of cussedness, I have no idea whether today's children will form part of a universal fry-up in 2050 unless we spend trillions of dollars to reverse the IPCC's sizzling predictions.
What I do know is that a number of highly respected climate scientists are asking serious questions about those forecasts and their queries dismissed as being of no relevance.
The head of Prof. Jones, preferably and poignantly on a false "hockey-stick" graph, has been called for; an American climate scientist has asked that Jones be barred from any further participation in the IPPC; even The Guardian's George Mon-biot, who genuflects before the temples of the CRU and GW and other unholy cows, has been traumatised by 'Climategate', and has called for Jones's scalp. The repercussions for the IPPC would be, may already be, gynormous; don't hold your breath.
Whom the gods destroy...
Earlier this month I came across an article about a certain Diane Francis, who is the Canadian National Post's editor-at-large. After a column she contributed to the newspaper, she should not remain at large; in it she grimly concluded that the accelerating climate change was such that a swift answer would be "a planetary law" (sic) on the lines of China's one-child policy.
That policy led, and Ms Francis must know it, to coercive population control, millions of unborn girls being slaughtered and, as a direct consequence, to a gender imbalance that the Chinese government must now deal with.
Not surprisingly, Francis, a feminist, was asked how she could call herself that "if you say that it's not necessarily a bad thing for a totalitarian state to tell women how many children they can have". Was not that the ultimate anti-choice attitude? Not in her book, apparently.
Nor was she clear as to how her proposal for a one-child policy would be enforced - "...with fines, or imprisonment, or execution, or castration?" freelance journalist Don Feder asked. And added, "It's amazing that someone can look at China, with forced abortions, forced sterilisations and female infanticide and can see that as a model... mind-boggling."
But wait; the link between greening the world and depopulating existed before Francis espoused the idea. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) executive director Thoraya Obaid said: "Rapid population growth and industrialisation have led to a rapid rise in greenhouse emissions. We have now reached a point where humanity is approaching the brink of disaster."
Where Obaid, or rather the UN's annual State of World
Population 2009, differs from Francis is that the report accepts that "Government edicts and targets on fertility levels, has (sic) no ethical place in contemporary rights-based policymaking".
Instead, with Unesco, the fund has called for explicit sexual education for all the world's child-ren over five years of age. The answer is a "rights-based approach", sexual and reproductive rights and the "right and access to abortion".
The EU, never far behind, and often in front, is reported to have made a pre-Copenhagen proposal "that population trends be among the factors that should be taken into consideration when setting greenhouse-gas mitigation targets".
Coming from a demographically dying continent where most of its nation components are floundering at below replacement levels, this is not merely risible, it is stupendously crass.
To make matters less risible, the Chinese vice-minister of Population and Family Planning Commission has gone on record to say, "Population and climate change are intertwined, but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming". Does anybody seriously want China's opinion on this?
Last July, and prior to that, the Population Research Institute carried out investigations on the ground in China and found that the UNFPA was complicit in China's coercive birth control policies. Its president, Steve Mosher, reported back that, "Women continue to be arrested for the crime of being pregnant. They continue to be forcibly aborted."
A footprint was once known as a human footprint; no longer. We are being told, with an insistence bordering on bad manners, that unless we do something about the carbon footprint we are doomed. And incidentally, cow-flatulence is not doing the planet any good either.
Expect a two-pronged assault from the Francises of this world (to eliminate any kids whose parents have selfishly decided they wish to have as brothers or sisters for their first-born); and from vegetarians who can now regard cows placidly breaking wind on sunlit meadows as they chew grass, as threats to the planet and ripe for elimination.
Whom the gods destroy...
But enough of all that madness and let us visit another asylum before this mad old year turns into a new mad world in four days' time. Tina Beattie, a professor of Catholic studies at Roehampton University and a director of The Tablet, should be an unlikely inmate, but don't bank on it.
Beattie delivered a lecture in Dublin some time this month or last. In the course of her talk she took a swipe at Pope Benedict's teaching on the family in a manner that was coarse by any standard; it is worth quoting:
"Caritas in Veritate promotes the primacy of the family over and against the abuses and powers of the State and the economic order, and it has, in my view, a culpably naïve approach to the problem of over-population.
"Referring to 'the problems associated with population growth', the encyclical points out that 'This is a very important aspect of authentic development, since it concerns the inalienable values of life and the family'. However, it immediately goes on to discuss the problems created by declining birth rates, and it insists that the solution to population problems lies in 'the primary competence of the family in the area of sexuality'.
"When I read that, I thought, 'try telling that to Josef Fritzl's daughter', who happened to live in one of Europe's few remaining bastions of conservative Catholicism'."
Well, if Beattie thought that, she must be a basket case, congenitally unaware of her limitations. Teaching Catholic studies that are not Catholic, still less studious, hardly equips her for this task. Pope Benedict's teaching, if I may quote Barack Obama in a different context, is clearly "well above her pay-grade"; certainly beyond her grasp.
Could be worse, though; she could be Sister Quinn (another Dominican, I am afraid) who loiters outside abortion clinics not to persuade the stressed mother-to-be to be a mother, but to protect her right to kill the child within her.
While the gods are at it, they could consider the guys who rustled up expensive pyramids of Poinsettia along the Sliema promenade, for one place. Not one of the red-faced plants made it to Christmas, except in the sense that turkeys do; most expired well before then.