According to an article in The Guardian, personal CO2-quotas could soon be introduced in Britain. If the warmists get their way, that is. These personal carbon allowances would set a limit on every individual’s emissions, thus “stimulating” switching to greener products and services.

“Last year, a report by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) effectively dismissed personal carbon trading after consultants estimated it would cost £700m-2bn to set up and £1bn-2bn a year to run, therefore “outweighing by many times” any benefits in changing public behaviour.”

However, this has not stopped the activists from promoting the scheme.

“Some people will adopt greener living because they think it’s the right thing to do, but the bulk of the population need to feel that they are part of a movement,” said Matt Prescott, project director for the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

Last year, the environmental audit committee of MPs said carbon trading “might be the kind of radical measure needed to bring about behaviour change”.

Now, the question is, would everyone be given the same emission limit, or would some animals be more equal than the others?

It’s been long argued that environmentalism, and especially climate alarmism, is based more on faith that facts. According to the Greens, Man is a destroyer by nature, and his actions should be strictly controlled. It is often said that the Earth would in fact benefit if mankind was eradicated once and for all. On our quest to transform the nature so that it best suits our dirty needs, we pervert and pollute what’s pure and innocent.

Jonah Goldberg has written an interesting article about the difference between environmentalism and conservationism.

At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. (…) Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past.

Read the entire article on Townhall.com.

Many environmentalists seem to long back to the times long gone, when nature ruled and humans lived in awe of everything. They argue that nature has an intrinsic value and that all created things are equal and should be equally respected.

But the truth is that over 99 percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth have perished because of nonhuman factors. Nature doesn’t care about biodiversity. It us, humans, who value biodiversity because it reflects the state of the world we currently live in. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Without us, the beauty of nature would not exist.

Our environment includes all of our surroundings. We arrange these surroundings to improve the environment and thus make it more useful to ourselves. Our resources expand over time as a result of our increasing knowledge.

Human life has never been easy. In the Middle Ages, we lived in constant fear. Starved, filthy and wearing the same clothes day in and day out, we dwelled in dirt plagued by insects. Using cow dung as cooking fuel could hardly be considered healthy.

The modern 18th century man lived in cold, overcrowded houses and threw garbage out on the street to rotten. Rats were spreading diseases. The plague and cholera were killing thousands. At the end of the 18th century, as agriculture became more efficient, feeding the family got easier. But the diet was still meager and unhealthy. Due to lack of good storage facilities, food often turned sour or rotten.

The 19th century was a dream in comparison. But still, food options were limited and fruits only available in summer time. Food poisoning was common. Children died or became invalids following illnesses now preventable by vaccination. We didn’t know what was going on in the world. In order to listen to some music, we had to go to a concert – if we could afford it.

In the rich modern world, we have eradicated extreme poverty and hunger. Everyone has access to a rich and varied diet thanks to mechanized agriculture, fertilizers, pesticides, genetic engineering, better storage facilities and advanced logistics.

We have plumbing and garbage trucks. Home appliances help save valuable time and allow us more leisure. Material richness does not necessarily create happiness, but if we are to be happy at all, we need a longer and healthier life with plenty of choices. We don’t serve nature, nature serves us.

By John Coleman

jcoleman@kusi.com

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming. It is a SCAM.

Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data back in the late 1990’s to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental wacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization-threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda.

Now their ridiculess, manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental-conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy, with one 15 minute documentary segment.

I do not oppose environmentalism. I do not oppose the political positions of either party.

However, Global Warming, i.e. Climate Change, is not about environmentalism or politics. It is not a religion. It is not something you “believe in.” It is science; the science of meteorology. This is my field of life-long expertise. And I am telling you Global Warming is a nonevent, a manufactured crisis and a total scam. I say this knowing you probably won’t believe me, a mere TV weatherman, challenging a Nobel Prize, Academy Award and Emmy Award winning former Vice President of United States. So be it.

I suspect you might like to say to me, “John, the research that supports the case for global warming was done by research scientists; people with PhD’s in Meteorology. They are employed by major universities and important research institutions. Their work has been reviewed by other scientists with PhD’s. They have to know a lot more about it than you do. Come on, John, get with it. The experts say our pollution has created a strong and increasing greenhouse effect and a rapid, out of control, global warming is underway that will skyrocket temperatures, destroy agriculture, melt the ice caps, flood the coastlines and end life as we know it. How can you dissent from this crisis? You must be a bit nutty.”

Allow me, please, to explain how I think this all came about. Our universities have become somewhat isolated from the rest of us. There is a culture, and attitudes and values and pressures on campus that are very different. I know this group well. My father and my older brother were both PhD-University types. I was raised in the university culture. Any person who spends a decade at a university obtaining a PhD in Meteorology and becomes a research scientist, more likely than not, becomes a part of that single minded culture. They all look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.

And, there is something else. These scientists know that if they do research and results are in no way alarming, their research will gather dust on the shelf and their research careers will languish. But if they do research that sounds alarms, they will become well known and respected and receive scholarly awards and, very importantly, more research dollars will come flooding their way.

So when these researchers did climate change studies in the late 90’s they were eager to produce findings that would be important and be widely noticed and trigger more research funding. It was easy for them to manipulate the data to come up with the results they wanted to make headlines and at the same time drive their environmental agendas. Then their like-minded PhD colleagues reviewed their work and hastened to endorse it without question.

There were a few who didn’t fit the mold. They did ask questions and raised objections. They did research with contradictory results. The environmental elitists berated them, brushing their studies aside.

I have learned since the Ice-Age-is-coming scare in the 1970’s to always be a skeptic about research. In the case of global warming, I didn’t accept media accounts. Instead I read dozens of the scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. I have studied. I have thought about it. I know I am correct when I assure you there is no run away climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. It is all a scam, the result of bad science.

I am not alone in this assessment. There are hundreds of other meteorologists, many of them PhD’s, who are as certain as I am that this global warming frenzy is based on bad science and is not valid.

I am incensed by the incredible media glamor, the politically correct silliness and rude dismissal of counter arguments by the high priest of Global Warming. (ED: Al Gore) In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious. As the temperature-rises, polar ice cap melting, coastal flooding and super storm patterns all fail to occur as predicted, everyone will come to realize we have been duped.

The sky is not falling. And, natural cycles and drifts in climate are as much if not more responsible for any climate changes underway. I strongly believe that the next twenty years are equally as likely to see a cooling trend as they are to see a warming trend.

Published with John Coleman’s permission. John Coleman works at KUSI NEWS Weather in San Diego and is the founder of the Weather Channel.