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If there really is a problem, the political nature of the controversy is designed to avoid solving it.

As a measure of CO2 pollution per unit of economic output, China requires nearly 1,900 units of CO2 to produce 1 unit of economic output, whereas the United States only requires 411 units of CO2 to produce an equivalent unit of economic output.

At that rate of efficiency, if and when China matches the United States in terms of overall GDP, it will be producing 28 million tons of CO2, compared to the United States’ production of 5.8 million tons. China will be producing significantly more CO2 than all the rest of the world put together.

If China were to develop the same standard of living per capita as the United States, its current efficiency would require it to produce 472 million tons of CO2, compared to the United States’ production of 5.8 million tons of CO2.

The fact is, the developed countries — Europe, Japan, and the United States — have developed extremely efficient economic control of CO2 production — a trend that is likely to continue. They do not and cannot pose the future threat of enormous increases in CO2 production.

If the “world community” really wanted to decrease CO2 production, it would force production to those nations which have obtained — generally through market economics — the highest conversion efficiencies.

Of course, that isn’t going to happen. Instead, the “Copenhagen” conference is all about the delicate task of punishing the efficient producers by caps and reductions, while rewarding the inefficient producers with “reduced” rates of growth that are essentially meaningless. The net effect will be — it has to be — to impose economic inefficiencies on the efficient producers while encouraging the inefficient producers — this can do nothing but increase the overall industrial CO2 production because production will be shifted for economic reasons to inefficient producers.

That is absolutely the opposite result of what should be the goal — if CO2 control has anything at all to do with the ostensible result.

The nagging question, however, is that with the enormous uptick in industrial CO2 — historically, the annual increases over the past decade have been the largest ever experienced from man-generated sources — there has been zero effect on global warming. It was an ideal, almost “laboratory test” of the hypothesis, tested under ideal conditions of a specific, pronounced, measured increase in CO2 occurring in large, regular increments over a period of time statistically significant in relation to the period for “global warming” due to CO2 increases is alleged. In addition, as opposed to credibility questions regarding temperature measurements for older data, the modern temperature data has been collected by the most widely distributed, most redundant, most advanced temperature global observation system. That is, in any assessment, it represents the most reliable data.

Indeed, the amount of CO2 forced into the atmosphere from man-caused sources has been far greater during the period of time of no measurable global temperature change, than the amount of CO2 forced into the atmosphere during the period of measured global temperature change. A statistician looking at the numbers without the political implications involved would have to state that, far from a positive statistical correlation of CO2 with rising global temperatures, 1) there is sufficient data to make probability analysis, and 2) that there is no, or even a negative, correlation between man-caused atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature increases.