But for whatever reason, I reject the whole concept of man-made global warming.

The same modern scholars who would mock the ancients for blaming the behavior of man for natural catastrophes are now telling me that driving an automobile that gets less than 20 miles a gallon will turn the world into a blazing hell on Earth.

In November 2007, John Brignell, a British engineering professor, made a list of 600 different things that "studies" said global warming would cause.

It included trees in Antarctica (which is now covered with 7.2 million cubic miles of ice).

Predictions of other changes caused by manmade global warming included an increase in avalanches and a decrease in avalanches, fewer bananas and more bananas, more salt in the Atlantic and less salt in the Atlantic, tectonic plate movement, no more White Christmases and more blizzards - and my favorite, more floods and more droughts.

The Telegraph newspaper in London had a report on Bill McGuire, professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London.

McGuire said global warming will lead to more volcanoes.

"The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane," McGuire said.

It does not just border on insane; it is.

But if you give a global warming believer enough time, he will eventually convince himself that global warming - not his dog - ate his homework.

Richard Siegmund Lindzen, 72, an atmospheric physicist at MIT, contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports of 1995 and 2001, but is now a skeptic.

"I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about," he said in London last month.

"It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is.

"It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is.

"It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should.

"The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes.

"The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal.

"The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak - and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest."

Follow the money. The government hands out millions in research grants to the pro-global warming crowd.

The idea of manmade global warming was used to justify the awarding of $35 billion in government loan guarantees to alternative-energy companies such as Solyndra, whose plurality owner was billionaire George Kaiser, a major fundraiser for Barack Obama.

Solyndra went belly up in August, leaving 1,100 people jobless.

Global warming also is used to justify tax credits of $7,500 to purchasers of the Chevy Volt.

According to GM, the average owner of a Chevy Volt has an annual income of $175,000.

I am not a skeptic when it comes to global warming. I am a cynic. Lindzen convinced me.

"Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition," he said in London.

"Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible.

"Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible, as does the evidence from Climategate and other instances of overt cheating."

Climategate revealed that contributors to the Nobel-winning 2007 IPCC report conspired to avoid freedom of information requests and to fudge their data on temperatures.

Add No. 601 to the list, Professor Brignell.

Global warming causes lying.

Surber may be reached at donsur...@dailymail.com. His blog is at http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber.