By Alex Newman

While United Nations global-warming dignitaries were invoking ancient Maya goddesses for help in hammering out a wealth-redistribution “climate” treaty, prominent columnists and publications around the world were heaping scorn and ridicule on the whole COP16 extravaganza currently underway in Cancun - even heralding the end of the whole “scam.”

From the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom, the amount of negative press for the climate hysterics - and their whole expensive confab in Mexico - is growing daily. And as UN leaders and climate negotiators ramp up the fear mongering and propose ever-more ridiculous scams and taxes, the barrage of ridicule will likely continue.

“Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse,” noted Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden in an opinion piece released last week. “The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion.”

And that’s why D.C. bigwigs, who flew into Copenhagen on government jets by the dozens for last year’s global-warming conference, have stayed home this year. “Nobody wants to get the smell of the corpse on their clothes,” explained Pruden, citing the notable absence of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other global-warming alarmists in Congress - most of them far less enthusiastic about the crusade than at this time last year.

“When the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone, as star-crossed lovers have learned through the ages, and when a scam collapses, it stays collapsed,” he concluded. “The thought is enough to warm hearts all across the globe.”

In Canada, newspapers and columnists were equally harsh. “This global-warming/climate-change stuff is a great racket,” wrote Rex Murphy in a piece entitled “Cancun sun speeds decay of global warming charade” for the National Post. He then takes aim at “the class of professional alarmists who’ve been banging on about global warming for close on two decades now” as they hold their extravaganza in a sunny resort city where tourists flock to enjoy the warm weather.

“Perhaps they know that this show of theirs is on its last legs, the jig is up, the great game is over. After the unsuccessful 2009 Copenhagen conference, they had to have realized that even Al Gore and all Al Gore’s grim little men would never be able to put the whole rickety, tendentious machine back together again,” Murphy explained. “After Copenhagen, and especially after Climategate, even the true believers must have lost heart.”

But will Cancun be the last global-warming summit ever? “It’s possible,” Murphy suggested. “And with Japan having walked away from the whole idea of Kyoto, it’s hard to see how they’ll work up the steam for another holiday next year.”

And even in England - where the political class seems obsessed by global warming and carbon taxes even as the snow-covered nation suffers its fourth abnormally cold winter in a row and millions of families have trouble heating their homes - the press has been brutal to the warmists. Columnists for the Telegraph and reporters for the Daily Mail, two of the U.K.’s largest papers, have put the climate crusade to shame.

“The global warming scare may have been fun for the children while it lasted. But the time has come for the joke to be declared well and truly over,” opined Christopher Booker in a column entitled “Cancun climate conference: the warmists’ last Mexican wave” appearing in the Telegraph.

“What we are seeing here is one of the greatest collective flights from reality in the history of the human race,” he noted. “As western Europe shivers to a halt and our energy bills soar through the roof, the time has come when we should all start to get seriously angry with our politicians for being carried away by all this claptrap.”

In a separate piece for the Telegraph published before the COP16, Booker called on Ministers of Parliament to face the cold, hard truth. After blasting British and European politicians for groveling over the discredited theories, he puts a price tag on some of the more outrageous programs. “Not a single MP of any party has yet found the courage to mount a properly briefed challenge to all this lunacy. So what do we pay them for?” he wondered in the column, entitled “The climate change scare is dying, but do our MPs notice?”

The Daily Mail, another prominent British newspaper, also revealed a massive hole in the warmists’ arguments as the Cancun conference was becoming increasingly shrill about the supposed warming. “For the past 15 years, global warming has stopped,” noted the report, calling this fact an “inconvenient” truth in honor of alarmist-in-chief Al Gore. “This isn’t meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise.” “Little by little,” explained the article, “the supposedly settled scientific ‘consensus’ that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.” Next, it cited former climate luminaries - most of whom have since fallen in disgrace - admitting there was indeed a medieval warm period and that “there has been no statistically significant warming” since 1995, in the words of the now-discredited Climategate “scientist” Phil Jones.

“The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple,” the article concluded. “Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?”

Of course, there are still numerous establishment organs pushing alarmist man-made global-warming theories in the United States - the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and the New York Times among the more prominent. Around the world, the situation is similar.

But the number of writers and publications taking a firm stand against the alarmists is steadily growing. Human Events and Canada Free Press have both published scathing pieces about the alarmists and their claims. And around the world, more and more media are risking the ire of bureaucrats and officials to expose the fraudulent warmist hypotheses.

The New American magazine predicted the slow death of the global-warming crusade in an article earlier this year as politicians who supported the hysteria began dropping like flies and the warmists were still licking their wounds from Copenhagen and a devastating series of scandals. But with so much invested in the scam, it will definitely not go down quietly or without a fight. For now, the embattled parade is scheduled to limp on in Durban, South Africa, next year. See post here.