Charles, Prince of Wales, heir to Britain’s throne, spoke inspiringly--or was it despairingly--to the UN climate conference Tuesday, urging action because the “survival of the species is in peril.”

Well, now, there’s a motivator for you! If we don’t clinch an effective treaty here in Copenhagen, this week, mankind may go extinct!

I suppose some radical environmentalists, who believe mankind broke the “animal contract” around the time we figured out how to start a fire and therefore should go extinct (http://www.vhemt.org), hope both that Charles is right and that the conference fails to adopt an effective treaty.

The truth is that Charles is wrong. None--I repeat, none--of the responsible scientific studies suggest that human extinction might be the result of manmade global warming. The world’s most respected body of manmade warming believers, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, doesn’t even come close to that in its scenarios.

Nonetheless, treaty negotiators are still trying to work something out--and not getting very far. Tensions remain high between rich and poor nations, the latter demanding more billions from the former, the former demanding more emission reductions from the latter, and both sides accusing each other of irresponsibility and lack of love and injustice and whatever else happens to come to mind.

What seems to be staying front and center in the whole process is the goal of a major redistribution of wealth from developed to developing countries, and to facilitate that the creation of a global mega-bureaucracy that takes us one step closer to global government.

Thus far it’s been mostly bureaucrats and cabinet-level officials from various nations occupying center stage in the conference (while protestors of all sorts occupy it outside the conference). Shortly, though, about 115 heads of state from around the world will begin arriving. That’s when we can expect all remaining semblance of sanity in the process to disappear.

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said, “The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they will sleep at night.” We could add a third--the making of treaties.