Dr. Perry S. Ong
Dr. Perry S. Ong
UPD professor tackles a more holistic view of the environment.
Climate change is one of the hottest issues around, with both the private and public sectors in countries all over the developed world taking initiatives to spread the message of environmental awareness.
Even the media has joined in, with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Harrison Ford lending their star power to the cause.
Although the issue has been around for a while, it has experienced resurgence in recent months, with the release of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” breaking the box-office record for a commercially released documentary and for which its narrator Al Gore and the cooperating agency the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr. Perry S. Ong, director of the National Institute of Biology, had a different take on the matter in his lecture “A Centennial Conversation: Anthropogenic Global Warming: Beyond the Hype.”
The lecture is the latest installment of UP’s Centennial Lecture Series and was held last May 14 at the auditorium of the UP National Institute for Science and Mathematics Education Development (NISMED).
Here Ong voiced his concern for the apparent over attention being showered on the issue, saying that climate change should be put into perspective relative to the other environmental issues plaguing the planet.
It’s not just us
While he does not dispute the reality of climate change, he did challenge the assumption that human activity is the sole cause for it.
According to Ong, climate change is not a new phenomenon, as it also has natural causes, including the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates, the natural changes in the earth’s orbit and the changes in the earth’s atmosphere.
Dr. Perry S. Ong compares the Earth’s atmosphere
with its neighboring planets at the NISMEND
auditorium during his lecture “A Centennial
Conversation: Anthropogenic Global Warming:
Beyond the Hype” last May 14.
“[G]reenhouse gases, which causes the greenhouse effect, is just one of many variables that all interact together in an eternal tug-of-war of global warming and global cooling, creating the conditions where we find ourselves in today. Human contribution to climate change is just one among many.”
Citing last year’s report of the IPCC, Ong noted that when the changes in the levels of carbon dioxide and temperature in the last few million years are observed with the appropriate scales, “one can see that there appears to be no pattern/trend between the two variables.”
Ong offered an alternative explanation to the phenomenon, that the climate changes happening right now are simply part of a larger cycle of warming and cooling.
“In the late 1970s there were warnings about an impending global cooling and when one reviews the literature, what happened was that in the last one hundred years, reports [have] been seesawing between getting cold or getting warm globally!”
“And who is to blame the[n] when we look at the temperature record? It seems that between the 1850s and 1970s, we were below average, meaning we were experiencing mild weather conditions and it would appear that we are currently emerging from this cold spell. It is like coming out from an air conditioned room after 100 years directly into a hot day.”
He reviewed the IPCC report regarding several variables that contribute to the rise in global temperature and noted that “we have very little knowledge about how the six out of the eight variables contribute to increase in temperature.…there is a possibility that if more information becomes available, there is a potential for this to cancel out the supposed warming effect of CO2. If this happens, how can we now explain the observed increase in temperature?”
According to Ong, evidence points to a possibility that we are simply in an interglacial period.
“If you look at the larger timescale, we are in between ice ages and some even consider that the warming we’re experiencing is extending the occurrence of global cooling or the next ice age. Although in the IPCC report they estimated that the next ice age won’t happen till about 30,000 years from now.”
Dr. Alyssa Peleo-Alampay, Associate Professor of the National Institute of Geological Sciences (NIGS) and Balik Scientist Awardee of the Department of Science and Technology, supported this claim by saying that there has been a cooling trend from the time of the dinosaurs up to the present.
“It’s a warm time in the cold time of earth history.”
Grounded
Ong warned that humanity should be careful not to blame all the problems to climate change, as it is not the only concern and that the focus on climate change could be detrimental to other major environmental issues.
Citing 12 major environmental problems from biologist Jared Diamond’s book Collapse (one of which is climate change), Ong said tending to other major issues would actually be a better idea as each problem is linked to another.
Some of these issues include the destruction and conversion of forests, oceans and freshwater systems, the overharvesting of wild food, particularly fisheries and the loss of biodiversity.
“Climate change has become a convenient excuse when there are other [environmental] issues that need to be addressed…If we disproportionately blame ourselves for [climate change], our response will be different…we should look at the [bigger picture] and address other issues,” he said.
He also made note of a recent decision by a court in the United Kingdom where An Inconvenient Truth was prevented from being shown in schools as an educational video without proper guidance. The court cited nine errors that were committed in the making of the film. These included the claims about the melting of the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the drying up of Lake Chad and Hurricane Katrina.
Changing maps
Ong proposed his own approach in dealing with the reality of climate change by applying conservation in our everyday life.
“We have to change the map of the world, meaning our mindsets, our attitudes and practices.”
He cited something as simple as waste disposal and cell phone usage as examples of change.
“When traveling along EDSA, how many times have you experienced seeing hands popping out of cars in front of you dumping plastic bags of Jollibee or McDonalds? But if you ask these people if they are environmentally aware and if they are concerned about the environment, they will most likely say yes.”
“If we assume that there are about 90 million Filipinos, with a family size of five members per household. If each household has one cellphone, and if each cellphone needs five watts to charge then we would need 90 megawatts of electricity just to power cellphones.”
“Humankind is guilty of a lot of crimes against the earth, and pumping greenhouse gases is just one among many. If we are to ensure that the Earth will continue to support life as we know it, we have to address all 12 environmental issues in a comprehensive and systematic manner. No sacred cows, no ifs, no buts.”