Head WeatherWatch Analyst Philip Duncan writes about his thoughts on the impact of oil on our planet…

Why is it whenever I write a blog about the environment, be it global warming or the pollution, it draws such fiercely irrational comments?

Some of the comments that appeared after I wrote about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill the other day sounded as if I am pro-destroying the earth. Good grief – polluting the planet is something that humans, and all animals for that matter, need to do to survive.

The human race discovered Australia about 50,000 years ago… they didn’t arrive there because they were bored. Most likely, they arrived there because they had eaten and pillaged the land behind them and so continued to walk further along the coastline from Africa…eventually reaching Australia, by boat for the last couple of hundred kilometres. Again, it’s quite likely they left East Timor for Australia in search of food and a better life, as they had exhausted the resources along their travels.

In the year 2010 life is still somewhat similar. To survive in this brutal economy oil is a practical commodity. And just like our ancestors, once it’s gone, we will move on to the next resource.

We are not necessarily smarter these days either. Most scientists believed that our 50,000 year old ancestors had incredible skills in nature… they could taste the salt water at sea and know if land was nearby. Certain clouds in the sky would indicate a distant landmass beyond the horizon…and possibly smells in the air helped them work out other landscape opportunities.

Humans now a days are ‘dumber’ in the sense that we rely on computers, books and other people to tell us how to work things out. We don’t rely on our gut instinct as much.

Is Oil ideal? No. Is Coal ideal? No. Is it a fact of life for us now? Yes. And will us using it destroy earth – no way.

The powerful deadly facts:
Have you seen the power that mother nature has over us? Humans are dwarfs…not even that, we’re barely a speck of sand on a beach.

In one hurricane’s lifetime it can expend more energy than 10,000 nuclear bombs. A tectonic plate shift, like the one in San Francisco in 1989, can flatten a city in just 15 tiny seconds. A lump of rock from space 65 million years ago wiped out almost all living life on earth and was most likely the reason the dinosaurs were killed off. One earthquake in December 2004 created a tsunami that killed over 200,000 people in just hours. And each year heat waves kill more people than hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and floods combined.

Mother nature is the killer…and eventually, as the land masses on the planet continue to slowly move around the globe, they will merge together to create one land mass which will cover 30% of the earth and will create such hostile weather that life will barely exist, according to some scientists. Temperatures inland will be over 50 degrees each day while hurricanes several times larger than the ones we have today tear along the coastline.

I’m not saying lets be irresponsible about how much we pollute the earth, let me make it clear, the less we pollute the better…but come on, I believe it’s highly unlikely man drilling oil will doom this planet. Mother Nature has our finale already mapped out.