If we fully develop Alberta's oilsands and burn the oil they produce, we will raise the temperature measurably all over the planet. That's the conclusion of an analysis by University of Victoria scientists Andrew Weaver and Neil Swart and published in the journal Nature.

Rather a big deal, one would think. But that's not what we read in the media this week.

It's March, 1980. You are 19 years old and sitting at the wheel of your lime-green AMC Gremlin. Normally, you'd feel pretty cool. But you just left the gas station and it cost a fortune to fill up. Apparently, there was a revolution in the Middle East or something. Stupid Middle Easterners.

Ah, but who are you kidding? You can't afford gas at any price because you lost your job bagging groceries. The price of food and lots of other things is also going up like crazy. People are cutting back. They have to. This recession is brutal. And everybody says it will only get worse. They're scared.

You're scared, too. How will you score with the ladies if you can't take the Gremlin out of your parents' driveway?

Anxious and distracted, you miss a stop sign and T-bone a cement mixer. The Gremlin is totalled. You're in a coma.

For 31 years.

When a slick and smiling Jeff Rubin appeared in a Harry Rosen ad earlier this year, it was clear that the former CIBC World Markets chief economist has become more than a practitioner of the dismal science. He is a brand. A rock star. An international guru with a best-selling book and a long list of corporations eager to pay very large amounts of money to hear him forecast the future.

Unfortunately, the future the guru sees isn't pretty.

"What will 2011 bring?" he wrote on his blog. "Triple-digit oil prices." Unless you happen to have an oil well in your backyard, that's bad news. "Our last encounter with those prices was brief but decisive," Rubin wrote. It was in 2008. The shock to the economy was so severe it caused the global recession.

So should we batten down the hatches in 2011? I don't know. Unlike Jeff Rubin, I claim no powers of prognostication. I did, however, write a book about why expert predictions routinely fail, how experts delude themselves about their failures, and why people are drawn to the sort of expert who is most likely to be wrong. So I know something about the subject.

And what I know is that Jeff Rubin is an almost eerily perfect example of the sort of expert people should not listen to - but do anyway.

Want to make $100? It's easy. You send me $550. Cash or cheque. In exchange, I will send you a cool $100. Cash or cheque. Or a money order, if you prefer.

Is that a deal or what? No? Only a fool would fall for this? Well, then, the government of Canada is run by fools -- because it is about to implement a new environmental regulation which delivers $1 in benefit for every $5.50 it costs.