Environmentalists, and liberals in general, will sacrifice anything to fight–allegedly–global warming. So it makes me a little nervous to see that a scientific group in the U.K. has documented that humans contribute to “climate change” by breathing.

Of course, kids used to be taught this in junior high school: humans breathe in air, burn the oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. This is what used to be called common knowledge, but in today’s state of educational decline it is hard to say what information falls into that category.

But I digress. The British study focused not on CO2, but on methane and nitrous oxide:

For the study, the researchers investigated emissions of methane and nitrous oxide in human breath from 104 adult volunteers in the UK. After analysing they found that nitrous oxide was emitted by every participant, but methane was found in the breath of only 31 per cent of participants. The team said that those who do not exhale methane in their breath are still likely to “release gas ion flatus”, meaning by f****** or burping.

Happily, they didn’t try to measure those emissions. The bottom line is that these human emissions are small:

[C]oncentrations of the two gases in the overall samples let the researchers estimate the proportion of the UK’s emissions from human breath – 0.05 per cent for methane and 0.1 per cent for nitrous oxide.

You might think that would let us humans off the hook. But no:

[O]nce you factor in the f**** and burps being produced by humans, it becomes clear that humans are fueling global warming by just exhaling from lungs, scientists said.

The new study was led by Dr Nicholas Cowan from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh. In the paper, she said that the evidence of planet-killing breathing is pretty clear and it shouldn’t be ignored. “We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible,” she said.

So, is eliminating the human race too great a price to pay to fight global warming? I have no confidence that greenies would say Yes.

But another motive could also be in play. Consider this:

Researchers didn’t manage to find any link between gases in the breath and diets. “Concentration enhancement of both CH4 and N2O in the breath of vegetarians and meat consumers are similar in magnitude. Based on these results, we can state that, when estimating emissions from a population within the UK, diet or future diet changes are unlikely to be important when estimating emissions across the UK as a whole,” the study read.

Is that a footnote, or the real point of the study? I suspect the latter. The international Left is trying to abolish meat eating–by you, not them–as a means of fighting climate change. (Really, it is just to make your life worse, which is their real goal, but that is another topic.) So the exercise reflected in this report may have been intended to show that people who eat meat contribute more to global warming than vegetarians, as one more arrow in the Left’s anti-carnivore quiver. If that was the intention, it wasn’t realized. So toss a couple of steaks on the grill, while you still can.