The Great Global Warming Swindle.

HOW easily the buzzwords "Global Warming", "Climate Change" and "Carbon Footprint" have slipped into common parlance. How easily they have been accepted as "fact."

Ditto for the related money-grubbing scams. I'm referring, of course, to the levying of "green taxes" and the purchase of carbon offsets--that practice of allowing the buyer to continue his energy-guzzling ways while having his sins forgiven with a cash payment. Thus Al Gore buys carbon offsets to justify living in an electricity-sucking mansion ... from the carbon credit company he owns!

How does he get away with it? Easy. He's protected by environmentalist propaganda, administered daily by media commentators, editorial writers and professors preaching ever more hysterical dogma-masking-as-news. According to them, there are only a few years to save the planet before we reach the tipping point of irreversible catastrophic climate change, and the end of civilization.

Forget the growing numbers of serious scientists openly challenging these apocalyptic apostles of man-made-CO2-driven climate change. They're completely ignored by a complicit media intent on frightening taxpayers into accepting their proposed reduction programs.

Wasn't it Sir John Houghton, the first chairman of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) who wrote in his 1994 book: "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen?"

You have to laugh, particularly here in Britain where the silly season got a whole lot sillier last month with news that failure to recycle can now be forgiven.

Yes, Dom Anthony Sutch, a Benedictine monk who is now a parish priest in Suffolk, was on hand at the Waveney Greenpeace Festival to hear the confessions of eco-sinners.

"It is not, I hope, blasphemous to do this," Father Sutch told The Times. "I do not think it is. It is just an attempt to make people conscious of the way they live. The Church is aware of green issues and of how aware we have to be of how we treat the environment."

His confessional was based on the Earthly Sins booth at this year's Glastonbury Festival where penitents were asked to sign a pledge to switch to renewable energy or ethical banking.

But Father Sutch admits his efforts weren't entirely green-lighted: "I've had one or two comments about abuse of the confessional. One or two people have said, 'Father, is this quite right?' Luckily, more people see it as an excellent idea. As with all these things, we have to look in the mirror and see what we could stop consuming ourselves."

This is indeed a religion, complete with its own eschatology. "People will be confessing to things like, 'I have bought a new car even though I didn't need one', or 'I flew to Australia last year'," said one activist offering post-confessional advice. "I have come up with some penances, such as making a donation to a green charity or telling ten other people what you have done."

Yet few Catholics seem aware that indulging in such nonsense supports what is actually a systematic rejection of industrial civilization, technology and prosperity in favour of a return to more primitive societies--and, of course, fewer children, since humans are regarded as pollutants.

The hidden agenda? People are subtly being seduced into regarding themselves not as children of God but as vermin blighting a threatened planet.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, said it best in a must-see documentary titled The Great Global Warming Swindle (WAG Productions 2007), in which he describes this movement as essentially anti-human.

"The environmental movement has evolved into the strongest force there is for preventing development in the developing countries," warns Moore. "I think it's legitimate for me to call them anti-human. You don't have to think that humans are better than whales or owls or whatever, if you don't want to, but surely it's not a good idea to think of humans as scum ... to think that humans are a cancer, so who cares about them, while at the same time romanticizing the hundreds of millions of people living without basic sanitation or clean water or health care or education."

But no one should be surprised. Al Gore's eco-religion is the logical outgrowth of godless materialism and its consequent guilt. "Today, if you side with industry, you're branded a destroyer of worlds," Moore says. "Industry has become a dirty word; industriousness is no longer a virtue but the culprit in the piece. Yet it is industry that is feeding and clothing and housing us every day and I don't see a viable alternative being offered up. Yet these people seem to think that poverty is the solution to our environmental problems ... that if everyone lived in poverty with very, very little, that the Earth would be fine."

So when you're tempted to think that "green" equals "good", think again: the truth is you're being mugged yet again by same ole' enemy armed with a new PR line promoting the same ole' agenda. Which is? The total destruction of God's beloved creature--Man.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist She writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.