Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Mark Twain may or may not have said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Sir John Houghton is trying to do something about it. As a result, the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan has awarded him the prestigious Japan Prize for 2006.

The 74-year-old physicist is recently retired from a long career in researching the physics of climate and weather. During that time, he has been a physics professor at Oxford University, the chief executive of the U.K.'s Meteorological ("Met") Office, and chair of the scientific assessment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He began to work on the effects of carbon dioxide emissions purely as an interesting physics problem. Eventually, he came to see it as his Christian duty to study the potential results of significant climate change. He has played a key role in gathering international groups of scientists, government representatives, and businesspeople to study the signs of global warming and to advocate for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avert the worst effects of climate change.

How has your Christian faith energized your work?

I gave my first lecture on carbon dioxide increase in about 1967, because I happened to be interested in the physics of the problem. It wasn't until the '80s that it became clear that it was a potential problem for humankind. And it wasn't really until I began to work with the IPCC [formed in 1988] that I began to realize the importance of this from a Christian point of view.

We have a strong Christian responsibility to care for the earth and every part of creation. We also have a very strong Christian responsibility to care for each other in the world, our neighbors in other countries, especially those who are poor and who need a lot of help in order to get them out of poverty.

Why do you link care for creation with care for the poor?

People who are likely to be most disadvantaged because of climate change live in poorer countries. They haven't the infrastructure to cope with the problems of sea-level rise, floods, and droughts. Indeed, the incidence of such events will tend to be stronger in subtropical areas—southern Asia, South America, and the Caribbean—than in the industrialized world of mid-latitudes.

Some parts of the industrialized world may actually be better off because of global warming, because carbon dioxide is a fertilizer, and if the rainfall and other things are right, it will help us to grow crops with a little more yield. So there will be a tendency for global warming to create an even bigger disparity between the rich world and the poor world.

That's really not a good situation from a Christian point of view or from any point of view. If you're only interested in world security, it's not a good scenario. But from a Christian standpoint, Jesus said a great deal about poor people and helping them. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke very strongly about justice. And justice should be near the top of all Christians' agendas. I've realized it all the more as I've gotten involved in this climate change problem.

Some Christian leaders claim that taking action on climate change means putting the non-human parts of creation ahead of human beings. How do you respond to that?

I don't think it's true. The impact of climate change that we're most concerned about is the impact on human communities—sea-level rise and floods and droughts. There's a conservative estimate of maybe 150 million environmental refugees by 2050. And those people will have to be looked after. So we are taking the needs of human communities, the need to love our neighbors as ourselves, and putting that very high on the agenda.

next page... |  1 of 4

April 2006, Vol. 50, No. 4