From Investors.com (Investor’s Business Daily):

With less than two months to go before the big Copenhagen Conference on global warming, two major nations have said “no thanks” to the no-growth agenda. For that reason alone, so should we.

Following a deal signed late Thursday between China and India, anything we might agree to do in Copenhagen is likely moot anyway. The two mega-nations — which together account for nearly a third of the world’s population — said they won’t go along with a new climate treaty being drafted in Copenhagen to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.

They’re basically saying no to anything that forces them to impose mandatory limits on their output of greenhouse gas emissions. Other developing nations, including Mexico, Brazil and South Africa, will likely reject any proposals as well.

The deal was already in trouble. Three weeks ago, the Group of 77 developing nations met in Thailand to discuss what they wanted to do about global warming. Their answer: nothing. …

They see clearly what the rest of us seem to miss — that, for all its bad science, the Copenhagen Conference is about the world’s Lilliputians tying down its Gullivers, not about global warming at all.

So, thanks to China and India, Copenhagen is dead — just as Kyoto was when it was signed in 1992, though no one knew it at the time. Without them, no global treaty on climate change will be workable.

The two nations are not only the world’s most populous (with, together, more than 2 billion people), they are also the fastest-growing major countries. China is now the world’s No. 1 emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is catching up fast.

Even with their participation, Copenhagen should have been a non-starter for the U.S. Indeed, the main reason for the greenhouse gas deal, all but admitted to by its major participants, is to cripple the U.S. economy — the most successful economy in the world.

True enough, as green critics keep saying, we produce nearly 20% of the world’s CO2 and other greenhouse gases with just 5% of the world’s population. But our GDP of roughly $14 trillion is nearly 25% of the world’s total — in line with our gas output.

We provide jobs and consumption not just for Americans, but for tens of millions of people overseas whose livelihoods depend on satisfying the massive American market.

In case you’re still worried about warming, stop. Since 1998, the data show global temperatures have fallen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says this can’t be happening. None of the IPCC’s models shows a possibility of rising CO2 output and declining temperature.

But even Paul Hudson, the pro-warming-theory BBC climate correspondent, recently had to admit: “For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.”

Yet, the IPCC estimates that “remediation” of the warming trend will cost about 1.7% of world GDP. In the U.S., that’s about $240 billion a year. For the entire world, it’s about $1 trillion a year — or $71 trillion over the next 70 years or so.

Proposals to slash CO2 won’t work anyway. Department of Energy estimates indicate that 97% of all CO2 emissions would continue even if humans didn’t exist.

Even so, climatologist Chip Knappenberger estimates that laws like the recent Waxman-Markey bill would, if fully enacted, reduce future warming by just 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100 — not enough even to measure accurately.

Can the world really afford to give up $71 trillion in the coming decades to solve a phantom problem?

Given the shoddiness of the science behind warming claims and the refusal of the biggest CO2 emitters to play along with the climate change sham, it would be economically ruinous for the U.S. to do anything other than wish the rest of the world a nice day, and go about our business.