What's remarkable isn't that China is now the world's #1 producer of greenhouse gasses. The truly unbelievable thing is that Al Gore and his minions criticized the United States severely for not signing the Kyoto agreement.

Of course, they never got around to mentioning that Kyoto never included China or India in its strictures. In short, the world's #1 polluter would have been free to release as much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere with as much speed as they could muster - something they evidently did spectacularly well:

China has now clearly overtaken the United States as the world's leading emitter of climate-warming gases, a new study has found. The increasing emissions from China - up 8 percent in the past year - accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, the study found.

The report, released Friday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, is an annual study. Last year, for the first time, the researchers found that China had edged ahead of the United States as the world's leading emitter.

But the results were not so clear-cut as those released Friday, and many experts were skeptical of last year's finding. The International Energy Agency continued to say only that China was projected to overtake the United States by the end of 2007.

"The difference had grown to a 14 percent difference, and that's indeed quite large," said Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the Dutch agency. "It's now so large that it's quite a robust conclusion."

Worse, China's emissions are likely to continue growing substantially for years to come because they are tied to the country's strong economic growth and its particular mix of industry and power sources, the researchers said.