To most people, environmental awareness is all about global warming, or climate change, as it is now known. The central theme is that increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 will inevitably lead to disastrous changes in weather patterns that threaten the future of the planet and its ability to support human life. Since burning fossil fuels is the main source, labelling CO2 emissions as the problem has many knock-on implications. In a nutshell, human activity and development, and therefore human beings themselves, become the problem.

The solution of reducing CO2 emissions has similar knock-on implications. It necessarily requires limiting industrial activity and the consumption of material goods as well as global population reduction to achieve a smaller ‘carbon footprint’. This whole picture of problem and solution rests on one very questionable assumption.

The view from outside the Matrix is very different. Using CO2 as the murder weapon, humanity is being framed as the culprit destroying the environment. However, if we look at the facts this amounts to getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. It is pollution of the environment that threatens both humanity and the planet. Individual human beings are not generally a threat to the environment, but the environment can be a very real threat to human beings. Governments and their nefarious activities threaten both!

There is a pressing need to identify a genuine environmental awareness rooted in the facts, that will not only serve individual human health but also save the planet. A self-centred approach focusing on our individual personal health requirements constitutes a win-win environmental awareness as opposed a ‘bolt on’ additional burden of concern.

Pollution versus CO2

Pollution is undesirable and to be avoided – whether in the form of exhaust particulates from internal combustion engines or the pernicious and far-reaching effects of the plant killing substance called Glyphosate. However, increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 cannot rationally be considered undesirable, given the evidence showing it is essential for plant life (and therefore human life) and the lack of evidence showing it to be a problem.

If we take human life as the rational standard of value, that which supports it is the good and that which destroys it, negates it or undermines it, is logically the evil. For clarity, it is reasonable to conclude that substances which cause ill health are anti-life and therefore evil (in a secular sense of the word) and substances that support human life are not.

Vegetable growers and horticulturalists have known for many decades that increasing the level of CO2 in poly tunnels helps plants to grow and therefore produce more crops for human consumption. A few years ago Ranga Myneni of Boston University suggested the concept of global greening when he presented an ingenious analysis of data from satellites that showed a 14% increase in green vegetation across the planet in the past 30 years. Matt Ridley presented this information in an article in the

Spectator magazine that you can read for further information. According to Patrick Moore, scientist and former president of Greenpeace, the ideal level of atmospheric CO2 for plants is about 1400 parts per million. The current level is around 400ppm and it is known to have been much higher than this in the past without the destruction of the planet!

Anthropogenic global warming is a major duff steer that does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not in doubt that CO2 has some greenhouse warming effect, but this is an isolated effect that does not take into account the many other complex variables in the atmosphere. It is certainly not a legitimate cause for all the alarmist scaremongering and miseducati...