Politicians apparently don’t watch the NOVA documentaries aired on PBS, because if they did, they would have seen “Polar Extremes” narrated by the Smithsonian’s Dr. Kirk Johnson, who shows that manmade carbon dioxide is insignificant to that produced by Mother Nature via volcanoes.

Dr. Johnson’s studies have shown that long before man invented the internal combustion engine, the planet had warmed to the extent that lush forests grew at the poles with dinosaurs eating plant life in Antarctica! This global warming was due to volcanoes spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere so that the planet warmed to that extent all the way to the poles!

Then, as the volcanoes stopped emitting carbon dioxide into the air, the earth began to cool as the carbon dioxide became “fixed” (removed from the air) by phytoplankton in the oceans and by plants on the land.

As a side note, approximately 50% of the earth’s oxygen is “terrestrial” and the other 50% is produced in the oceans, and all of it comes from the oxygen in cardon dioxide. These chlorophyll containing organisms create more of themselves (carbohydrates, proteins fats, vitamins, etc.) from the carbon in the carbon dioxide, while releasing the leftover oxygen into the atmosphere. Yes, that oxygen is actually phytoplankton and plant excreta! One organism’s excreta is another organisms food in the cycle of life. Isn’t biology fascinating? Back to the main even.

As this carbon dioxide was removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, the earth started to cool and ice formed over the entire planet, all the way down to the equator, waiting for the next round of volcanic eruptions. This has happened repeatedly over hundreds of millions of years and is yet another form of “circadian rhythm” in nature.

At a minimum, I ask that you spare 1 minute and 37 seconds of your time and watch the trailer for “Polar Extremes” on youtube at this url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npR–Hhrb-0M

Now, does this mean I think we should continue to burn coal and oil? No! I think the only fossil fuel that we should burn is methane, because, unlike the former two, it does not discharge sulfur and other toxic substances into our atmosphere and water. Methane burns “cleanly” into just water and carbon dioxide. I think T. Boone Pickens got it right when he lobbied for liquid methane to be used in vehicles, especially 18 wheelers.

Note that both China and India signed the Paris agreement to lower their carbon footprints, but what did they do then? They went home and continued to open up a new coal fired power plant every month and they continue to do so in complete violation of the agreement they signed. You can bet that they are going to continue to do so, but perhaps we could start selling them liquified methane and they could start to use more nuclear energy too. We need to start fracking, but just to produce methane.

We must stop burning coal and oil or else we’re going to poison our atmosphere and we can’t do without clean air and water. As Dr. Rene Dubos pointed out in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “So Human an Animal”, a slow contamination of our atmosphere is like the frog who will jump out of a hot pot of water, but if he is put in a cold pot and the water is heated very slowly until he is too weak to crawl out, his goose is cooked. If the contamination increases slowly, we fail to notice it, and that is why we are not noticing how bad the air is today than it was a century ago.

The clock is ticking and we need to get rid of the burning of oil and coal, but in my opinion, wind and solar are not the routes to go, and also there are not enough rare elements at our disposal to build the batteries for us to switch to electric vehicles. Let them run on methane.

Roger P. Orcutt, Ph.D., is a Dunkirk resident.