Think of it this way, Carbon leads to increased heat on the planet. The most common form of carbon on the planet is Carbon Dioxide. Too much carbon dioxide in the air leads to this increased heat. Over time when CO2 levels have risen due to natural events like mass volcanism that have occurred when the earth was younger, the result has been the warming of the poles which caused the deep ocean current to slow to a stop which caused the oceans to become anoxic (no 02) and give rise to huge algal blooms. Over time, these blooms would get larger and larger and the anoxic environment in these areas would kill off a great deal of oceanic life. These Algal booms used photosynthesis and that had the effect of removing CO2 from the air. As the individual algae died and sank to the bottom of the ocean they did not decompose natually due to the anoxic environment, they build up in massive layers. After a great deal of time, the algae would have taken enough of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and global temperatures would stabilize, the deep ocean current would restart and the algal blooms would dissipate as life returned to the ocean. The remains of the massive amounts of these dead algae at the bottom of the ocean were covered up and over millenia, they were transformed into oil and other ‘fossil fuels’. So essentially oil is fossilized sunlight from millions of years ago. Since this process tends to take incredibly long periods of time to happen naturally we would not see anything in our or most likely in the entire scope of humanity’s existence on the planet, BUT, when you start ripping through oil and burning it and loading up the atmosphere with all that CO2 that has been sequestered underground for millions of years since the last incident of massive global warming, it’s going to have a negative effect, don’t ya think? We’re using up MILLIONS of YEARS worth of stored up energy and dumping that CO2 back into the atmosphere, why wouldn’t the whole process start over again? Only at a vastly speeded up rate due to our use? That’s what I fear. That’s what we need to worry about and that is why we need to do something about our use of all fossil fuels before it’s too late and we can’t do anything about it at all.