So that's it, then, we're all doomed.

The chances of a new deal on 'climate change' at Copenhagen appear to be dead in the water, marooned like an albatross in an oil slick. Better start laying in supplies of baked beans and bottled water, since environmental armageddon must surely follow.

Gordon Brown told us weeks ago that we had only 50 days to save the planet.

Failure to reach a legally-binding global agreement to cut carbon emissions would mean the end of the world.

By that reckoning, we've got about a fortnight before the Earth turns to molten lava and we're eaten by marauding packs of polar bears, floating into town on what's left of the ice caps.

Think I'm exaggerating? Only this week, a former deputy mayor of London warned that we were all going to die in our sleep because police were advising householders to leave a light on at night to deter burglars.

Jenny Jones, from the Monster Raving Green Party, is demanding an urgent meeting with Met chief Sir Paul Stephenson, insisting that he stops encouraging home-owners to install motion-sensing security lights.

'The Met simply does not get climate change,' she wailed. 'They need a basic education in these issues before we all drown in our beds.'

Clearly, this is a woman in need of psychiatric help. She's like that nutter with the sandwich board who used to stand outside McDonald's in Oxford Street shouting at shoppers about the impending apocalypse.

The difference is that Miss Jones is taken seriously in some quarters and even managed to get herself elected to reasonably high office, something which has to cast serious doubts on the efficacy of the universal franchise and should serve as a warning to all those who advocate proportional representation.

If she genuinely believes that unless we switch off every light in London at night, the Thames will burst its banks and the North Sea will come cascading from the Wash down the M11, drowning millions in its wake, then she is clinically deranged and should be confined to a padded cell in a jacket which buttons at the back.

It takes an intergalactic leap of faith to make such an hysterical correlation. And that's exactly what it is - a leap of blind faith.

This column has long argued that 'man-made climate change' is a new religion. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before that status was conferred upon it by law.

A judge has just ruled that a 'global warming' fanatic, made redundant by a property company after refusing to fly on business, can seek unlimited damages for religious discrimination.

Mr Justice Burton said that 'a philosophical belief which is based on science' is entitled to receive the same legal protection as a sincerely-held religious conviction.

The trouble with 'man-made climate change' is that it isn't based on settled science, despite what the alarmists and their allies at the BBC would have us believe.

There is a welter of countervailing evidence that, far from warming up to boiling point, the Earth is actually getting cooler and the ice caps thicker.

More than 300 eminent, reputable scientists and research fellows in America have signed a declaration that 'man-made global warming' is a myth and dispute the link between carbon emissions and so- called 'climate change'.

The founder of the Weather Channel, a meteorologist who can be fairly assumed to have some idea what he is talking about, says that self-righteous hypocrite Al Gore should be sued for fraud over his scaremongering movie, A Convenient Lie, which British judges have already agreed contains a number of obvious distortions of the truth.

(Incidentally, it has just been revealed that Gore is on course to become a billionaire off the back of his stake in a number of eco-related enterprises. It's an ill wind...)

Look, I don't know for sure which side is right, maybe neither of them, but my natural inclination is always towards scepticism.

What does seem patently apparent is that when you look at the assorted vested interests lined up on the 'man-made' side of the argument, you can't help concluding that if all these opportunist politicians, madwomen, social engineers, sexual inadequates and quasi-communists agree then they are almost certainly wrong.

Politicians, in particular, love the great 'climate change' scare because it takes them a step nearer their fantasy of global government and allows them to impose an exciting array of new taxes, punishments and controls upon the peasants who pay their wages.

It has spawned a vast, self-perpetuating industry worth a fortune, of which the great 'carbon offset' scam is the most exploitative and ridiculous incarnation.

Paying someone conscience-money to plant a tree every time you fly? I wish I'd thought of that. This time next year, Rodney.

President Obama back-pedals, China opens another coal-fired power station every day, India pollutes with impunity and tinpot African states demand cynically that the West pays them hundreds of millions of dollars to play ball.

Meanwhile, typically Britain ploughs on regardless with characteristic lack of proportion and common sense.

Only this week, one over-inflated quango has suggested that in the name of 'climate change' we stop shopping and instead rent our clothes to cut down on waste.

I'm not quite sure how that would work, but most of the women I know would cheerfully slaughter every polar bear on the planet with their bare hands rather than voluntarily give up their wardrobe full of frocks and handbags.

How many fashionistas are going to admit to wearing a little black dress which has already had a couple of hundred outings?

Sorry, but when the twin religions of shopping and 'global warming' collide, there's only one winner.

We're all doomed.