There seems to be hysteria today about global warming especially from the so-called environmentalists who want us to stop using fossil fuels. They don't appreciate what fossil fuels have done for our standard of living, life expectancy and quality of life. They believe we are headed for the imminent destruction of our planet and the end of our civilization. Polar ice is melting, oceans are rising, end of days are here, the world's economy will collapse, and it is all mankind's fault.
There are a couple of things I can say for sure.
Firstly, the destruction of our planet Earth will not happen by our utilizing fossil fuels or by our putting CO2 into our atmosphere and there will still be 50 times the disolved CO2 in our oceans than in our atmosphere. Oceans may rise and fall as they have many times in the past and green house gases may increase and decrease but the Earth will continue to rotate around the sun and the moon will continue to rotate around the Earth. The Sun will still be the center of our solar system and dragging it on a 250 million year orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, long after mankind has disappeared from the planet.
Think about it. The Earth has been rotating around our Sun for 4.5 billion years. It has been evolving thru the milenia to more readily support our life. Why should we possibly think that now, in the next 10 years it would all vanish? Do you think that the Earth will go spiralling off into space? Why? Because we opened Pandora's Box and discovered fossel fuels? Aren't fossel fuels organic material, entirely created on Earth over millions of years?
Secondly, the world's economy will certainly collapse if we try to eliminate fossil fuels, the internal combustion engine, automobiles, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes. It would destroy entire industries. The petroleum industry, the transportation industry, travel, pharmaceutical, steel and manufacturing industries would be just the beginning. Millions of jobs would be lost. Our health care system would be devastated. Our military could not function. Our standard of living would plummet. Governments would not be able to replace the revenue and taxes from fossil fuels and we will never be able to pay the price. Our world's economy would surely collapse without fossil fuels.
The center of the Earth is 10,000 °F. Man didnt cause that. We have nothing to do with volcanic activity, on the Earth's surface or under Antarctica. We are not responsible for ocean vents belching up material from the Earth's core. We dont cause continents to drift or mountains to rise and we are not responsible for the heat or radiation from the Sun. We are not responsible for clouds or ocean currents or the jet stream. We had nothing to do with the extinction of millions of species, most from before man was on the planet. We just need to employ some common sense here.
About the Author: Growing up in the '60s, John Rickey was influenced by Jacques Cousteau, Sea Hunt, Flipper, and any National Geographic special on television. Early on he called himself an environmentalist, concerned about environmental quality especially of the human environment with respect to the control of pollution.
Somehow, by the '70s, the definition of environmentalist had been highjacked by liberal activists and changed to become political in nature especially against the petroleum industry and the use of fossil fuels. Many of these environmentalists argued for a return to a preindustrial society.
Upon graduating from University of California-Santa Barbara with a degree in Environmental Biology, John moved to San Diego to attend Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Although he never attended, he was offered multiple jobs the first day in was there. He worked for years in the commercial diving industry with commercial divers, Navy divers and sport divers. He taught underwater photography and ran diving excursions off the Southern California coast as well as Baja, Mexico.
John became active in the San Diego Underwater Film Festival and was responsible for getting Jean-Michel Cousteau to host one year which allowed John to meet his father Jacques Cousteau and his brother Philippe.
During the '70s John worked on many exciting projects in San Diego, from generating energy from ocean tides and waves, investigating reverse osmosis of salt water to clean water, homesteading land offshore San Diego in the kelp beds and building a ferro-cement underwater geodesic dome habitat. John worked at establishing an underwater museum displaying the many contributions of San Diego to the marine history. He helped support a dive on the Andrea Doria, and got permission from the Navy to take a World War II submarine and sink it off La Jolla as a man-made reef.
By the late 70's John was working in the petroleum publishing industry and traveling North America. He pretty much has been to every major and independent production and exploration company, drilling contractor and pipeline contractor in North America.
We all want clean air & water, safe roads, good schools and safe food at the grocery stores. Most of us work hard for our money and are supportive of investing in the common good. But for some reason, whether it is greed, power or control, the government wants to spend our money anyway they choose. They want to spend more money, even money we dont have and will never have.
Today John calls himself a global warming heretic. He is fighting the dogma of today's church of environmentalism which is made up of hundreds of well-meaning organizations and millions of passionate people worldwide that care about our planet. Unfortunately, the politics is controlled by activist, scientists taking grant money to prove a wanted outcome, government scientist with a political agenda, the media and even the United Nations. Their goal is to gain power and control and redistribution of wealth.
John is a very positive person and believes in independent scientific research and American exceptionalism. He knows we can solve our problems and continue to make improvements that better our lives.