There, but not quite

I thought I was dreaming when I read an anti-GWA news story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

"HUMANS MAY BE TAKING TOO much of the blame for climate change when it is largely triggered by natural causes, a biologist from the University of the Philippines said, citing nine errors in former US Vice President Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

"The award-winning and fourth highest-grossing documentary film ever showed the grim consequences of global warming with anthropogenic or human-caused greenhouse gases as the main culprit.

"But Dr. Perry Ong, director of the Institute of Biology at the UP College of Science, said human-induced global warming was among many environmental problems that interacted in the “eternal tug of war” between global warming and cooling.

"Popular explanations on the warming of the earth identified humans as being mainly responsible for influencing the climate through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

"According to the documentary, for which Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC), greenhouse gases emitted by humans were accountable for the death of polar bears, the melting of the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro and the dehydration of Lake Chad, among others.

"Ong said GHGs spawned by humans contribute merely 33 percent to global warming compared to the 67 percent traced to natural causes, which include changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions and the shifting of the Earth’s tilt and orbit.

“Humankind is guilty of a lot of crimes against the Earth and pumping greenhouse gases is just one among many,” Ong stressed.

"The scientist echoed an unconventional and less popular view on such a “hyped up” environmental issue during his lecture at the UP Diliman on Wednesday."

Oh boy, he is a marked man.

But I would say he isn't so much as a "skeptic" really when he says this:

"The surging human population must also be countered so as not to compound other serious environmental issues. More people would mean more deforestation, more demand for food and more loss of biodiversity."

There, but not quite.