If you would know what Copenhagen is all about, hearken to this nugget in The Washington Post’s report from the Danish capital.

“Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenari—who is representing all of Africa here—unveiled his proposal Wednesday for a system in which rich countries would provide money to poor ones to help deal with the effects of climate change. …

“Zenawi said he would accept $30 billion in the short term, rising to $100 billion by 2020. … This was seen as a key concession by developing countries, which had previously spurned that figure … as too low.”

There was a time when a U.S. diplomat would have burst out laughing after listening to a Third World con artist like this.

But not the Obamaites. They are already ponying up.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack just pledged $1 billion at Copenhagen to developing countries who preserve their forests. Thus, America, $12 trillion in debt and facing a second straight $1.4 trillion deficit, will borrow another $1 billion from China to send to Brazil to bribe them to stop cutting down their trees.

When you slice through the blather about marooned bears and melting ice caps, oceans rising and cities sinking, global warming is a racket and a crock. It is all about money and power.

Copenhagen has always been about an endless transfer of wealth from America, Europe and Japan and creation of a global bureaucracy to control the pace of world economic and industrial development.

End game: enrichment and empowerment of global elites at the expense of Western peoples whose leaders have been bamboozled by con artists.

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and Rita came ashore in Texas in 2005, we were told this was due to global warming, and hurricane seasons would now get worse and worse until the world radically reduced the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

President Bush ignored the hysteria. What happened?

As Michael Fumento reports, the 2009 hurricane season ended quietly, with the fewest hurricanes since 1997, and not one hurricane made landfall in the United States.

When the feds sought to list the polar bear as an endangered species, Gov. Sarah Palin protested this “politicized science” and sued, claiming the polar bear was a healthy species whose numbers had doubled in recent years.

Was she wrong?

Is the Arctic ice cap melting? So we are told. But what harm has befallen mankind other than to have a Northwest Passage opened up to maritime traffic in the summer?

The Antarctic ice sheet is nine times as large as the Arctic, and here is what the British Antarctic Survey wrote last April:

”(D)uring the winter freeze in Antarctica this ice cover expands to an area roughly twice the size of Europe. Ranging in thickness from less than a metre to several metres, the ice insulates the warm ocean from the frigid atmosphere above. Satellite images show that since the 1970s the extent of Antarctic sea ice has increased at a rate of 100,000 square kilometres a decade.”

One hundred thousand square kilometers a decade?

This would mean Antarctic sea ice expanded by 300,000 square kilometers since the 1970s, or 116,000 square miles, which is an area larger than all of New England.

How can the Antarctic ice cap grow for three decades as the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has steadily increased, unless carbon dioxide has little or nothing to do with global warming?

Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica is a continent, and while chunks of ice are cracking off in Western Antarctica, in Eastern Antarctica, four times larger, the ice sheet is thickening and expanding. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research reported last April that the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades.”

In April 1992, as the alarm over the Earth’s end times began, scientists worldwide issued what was called the Heidelberg Appeal, aimed at just the kind of hysteria we are witnessing now in Copenhagen.

“We are … worried … at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development,” said the scientists.

“We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look towards the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man’s first appearance in the biosphere. … (H)umanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse.

“We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudo-scientific arguments or false and non-relevant data.”

Since then, 4,000 scientists and 72 Nobel Prize winners have signed on. Again, it needs be said: Global warming is cyclical, and has been stagnant for a decade. There is no conclusive proof it is manmade, no conclusive proof it is harmful to the planet.