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Q: Sir John Houghton is without doubt one of this country's leading climate scientists, which means he was one of the first to notice and measure changes in the earth's climate. As Director General and Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office between 1983 and 1991, he was well placed to identify it. He'd come to the post from a sequence of academic roles in Oxford University - finally as Professor of Physics. Indeed, he first noticed something strange in the increasing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere as long ago as 1967. By the 1980s, the climate had become a concern that commanded headlines, and from 1988, Sir John led the scientific assessment for the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change for some 14 years.
He, among others, helped persuade Margaret Thatcher to take the matter seriously. Throughout his life as a scientist, Sir John has sought to reconcile his science with his beliefs as a lifelong Christian. In the process, he's set out his thinking in two books, 'Does God play Dice?' published in 1988, and more recently 'The Search For God - Can Science Help?' - based on his Templeton Lectures, which he gave in 1992.
Sir John Houghton, there a sense in which your life has been singly directed at one particular pursuit - and I wonder if you felt that in a way, this...direction that your life had taken, which has revealed so much for us about the nature of climate, was in some way God-directed?
Houghton: Looking back on it I have no hesitation in describing it in that way. But looking forward of course I was just very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was very much involved in making measurements, building instruments, observing the atmosphere from aeroplanes and balloons when the first Sputnik went up. And then of course the possibilities of measuring space from space were enormous. And tremendously exciting, because we could, for the first time, observe the atmosphere and the whole earth system, the whole of the oceans, twice a day we got observations of the whole earth and we could see how the whole global atmosphere and global oceans and the whole climate system worked.
Q: And d...
Houghton: And that was very exciting indeed.
Q: You were born in North Wales. Your father was a teacher, and it was a devout home...
Houghton: Mm
Q: ...em believing Christians. Indeed your father believed in Creationism. He'd rejected evolution. Did he expect you to do the same?
Houghton: Yes he did. But from an early stage, I think, I realised that if we were to believe in God as creator of the universe - creator of the earth, creator of life and everything in it, creator of me - then God has also given us the potential to find out about these things in science. And I never had any doubt that the science I was doing was God's science, because God was the Creator, I was finding out about him. I wasn't making it up, it was not something that humans had invented. It was like the early scientists and I read quite a bit about them at a fairly early stage. People like Newton and Boyle and Christopher Wren and other scientists, and many of them were devout Christians. And they did it, they were doing their science for the glory of God to find out about how God ran the Universe. So if we found things in our science that were telling us how God had made things and, and how God did it, and how God looked after it - then that was the story we had to fit in with any story that we might find of course in the Bible or elsewhere about creation. And so I had no doubt that there were these 2 sources of information were compatible.
Q: And the religion came first, because as a young boy in your home it was rooted in your upbringing...
Houghton: Mm
Q: ...and then the science came when you went to Oxford as a very young man...
Houghton: Mm
Q: ...to study the science. And the religion as it were...encompassed the science for you.
Houghton: I think the two were together actually. I had some very good science teachers at school, and of course I had Christian teaching from my parents. And the 2 never really came into enormous conflict, although I realise my father had certain views on how to interpret the Bible and the Creation Story. That didn't worry me that much ... as soon as I went to University, because I realised that science also was part of the story. You know those old scientists again, if I might refer back to those y'know people from the, from the early days of science they...often talked about two books. The book of God's Word and the book of God's Works. God's Word is the Bible and the stories of Jesus in particular of course. And then this book of God's Works - which is His works in creation. And those two books are there to be two parts of God's revelation. And I've really tried to put those things together for most of my life which has been a very exciting exploration.
Q: You rejected your father's idea of Creation as expressed in Genesis. So what do you make of the Genesis story?
Houghton: Well the Genesis story is a very remarkable story, and it's an account of course, not written for modern scientists. It was written at a very early time in the earth's history, and it describes rather well God creating the world in poetic language. It clearly wasn't a scientific account because of course the, the sun wasn't created till Day 4. So, yet you had evening and morning on Day 1 - so it was a poetic account. But nevertheless had some very important, particularly of course, theological information about God as the Creator. Creation is not part of God. Creation, God is the Creator, and how He created all the creatures of various plants, and the animals and so on. And finally created man in His own image. And that's an important thing to say.
Q: So you see Genesis as poetic - but when it comes to the New Testament and the story of Jesus and His death and Resurrection - you see that as literally true, do you?
Houghton: Well I see that as history and it reads as history. And the fact that there was somebody called Jesus is a very strong evidence for that and so I don't see that as poetry - no, I see that as genuine history.
Q: And the Resurrection?
Houghton: The Resurrection I believe as an event which of course is quite outside the er experience of science. But then it was a one off event. And...
Q: Because...
Houghton: ...and Jesus was a one off person. I worry about when people use pseudo-scientific arguments. They say 'Well people don't rise from the dead.' And that's true - they don't. As a scientist I'm bound to be very sceptical of a story about anybody coming back from the grave. But then as a Christian, as a believer in Jesus with some I hope, trust you know, a real experience of Jesus. And realising what Jesus came for...what He means to the whole human race, Jesus without the Resurrection is, is not an adequate Jesus.
Q: What makes you believe it?
Houghton: I suppose the first answer to that question - I was brought up to believe it. But that's, it's not an adequate answer, because of course, do I really believe it now? And the answer is I do, because I know, it's because it's, I have some personal experience of this person called Jesus. I believe that I can pray to God and that's something real to me. I believe that God does answer prayer, although it's, sometimes I query it, and it's, it's not always exactly what you want, and so on. It's not a simple story. But then when you...look at the whole of the Christian message, the whole of the Christian story of Jesus coming to rescue us, humankind, from sins and offering of salvation. And when you realise that He's also promising a new creation in due course, because of what He's done, the whole of that story as a world view is quite unparalleled, I think, in the whole of human writing or learning or experience. And I cannot see any other, I know of no other message which can...present to the world a God who is not just a remote God a long way away, but a God who is personal and who is with us today.
Q: Let's talk about the work that you set out to discover really, in the '50s, and have gone on examining ever since. Which is climate science.
Houghton: Mm-hm
Q: Initially of course, your research was leading you to space travel and exploring space in terms of the way the Russians launched the Sputnik, which you remember.
Houghton: Mm-hm
Q: It's taken rather a different direction now, hasn't it? You could never have anticipated the climate becoming such an issue. When did you get an inkling that something was really wrong here?
Houghton: Well the first work I did was, in climate science, was making observations of the earth's atmosphere from, from satellites, building instruments for that purpose. Very exciting thing to do actually, working with NASA in the 1970s and we put instruments on a full NASA satellite, and we realised that y'know, we were getting information of an interesting kind over the world. And it wasn't really until the 1980s I suppose that I and others realised that y'know this increase in carbon dioxide being emitted by humans - and we knew that was occurring. We knew it was going to cause some changes. We began to realise that these changes might be important and might be, might have some negative influence on some parts of the world, or change the climate in some way. And therefore it became a bigger issue and in fact in 1988 it began to become a political issue.
Q: But were you to any extent a 'voice crying in the wilderness' in those early days? Did people say 'No, no, no - you're exaggerating. It can't be that bad, it can't, can't go wrong'?
Houghton: Well people were not that interested of course in those days, and nor were we actually as scientists. Many of us thought 'Well this is an interesting issue. It may have some implications. It may have some negative implications.' But we never realised quite how big they were likely to be until we were getting towards the late '80s, when y'know, it began to be of importance to, or potential importance to the, y'know to the world at large. And even then in the late '80s, I never realised how y'know, the story we have today of some real damage, and very devastating potential in, particularly in the Third World and in poor countries.
Q: D'you think God, whom you believe to be the Creator of this world, intended climate change?
Houghton: Well climate change is a result of human activity. Now at one level of course, God knew about it because I believe God is aware of what humans are doing. You can't blame God for climate change because we have to blame humans for it, and it's our fault that it's occurred. We didn't realise what damage we were causing, but now we do there's an enormous moral imperative for us to take action to do something about it. We can't expect God to do something about it in that sense - although I also believe that God helps us with that actually. Because you know, we've been told to look after the earth, we were told in Genesis to care for the earth and its people. And God wanted us to do that. That was one of our, the first actions that humans were told to do.
Q: But as a believing Christian, it must distress you to think that mankind is damaging the Creator's work. Is that how you see it?
Houghton: Yes I am distressed by that, and I feel it's y'know, we have to rep...as Christians we have to repent of that. As human beings, we need to say we're sorry we're doing all this damage. We didn't realise we were doing such a lot of damage and now we've got to turn around and put it right. And that's not just a Christian thing to do - it's a human thing to do of course.
Q: Do you think that in any sense it's God's punishment to humankind for their profligacy and indulgence?
Houghton: Well...judgement occurs because em, because of what you do very, very frequently. There's an inevitable judgement built into the system. And because we're putting our fossil fuels into the atmosphere, there is a damage, which that is causing. And that is acting as a judgement on the whole human race, in a sense. And we've got to accept that as, as the consequences of our action and do something about it. Now to say, but say God is judging us, it's er, it sounds as though God is wielding a heavy hand whereas in fact, it's our own fault for doing it.
Q: Nonetheless, He is the God who judges and...
Houghton: Of course.
Q: ...and, and there are people who would say that your, the consequences of your actions are God's way of punishing you. But you don't go that far?
Houghton: I think that's er, you have to put it in context actually. You've got to be careful how you say that otherwise you're making God the author of the evil, which is happening - and we mustn't do that. Because God is not an author or evil, but God, God is a master at turning bad things into good ones actually. Which is an essential part of the Christian message.
Q: If it's our moral responsibility, God-given responsibility to save the planet, to look after it, what is required of us? What should we do?
Houghton: Well there are lots of things we can do, and all of us can do something. There are things that governments need to do in order to change the way, or provide the means or the framework in which the way we get energy can be changed from burning fossil fuels. 'Cos you're getting energy from non fossil fuel sources. They can provide incentives, government can provide incentives to...for us to become much more efficient in our use of energy.
Q: So we have to be political, we have to lobby and we have to be noisy in, in er...
Houghton: Yes we have to, we have to lobby and we have to persuade government that there are lots of things they can do. We have to persuade industry or get industry interested in things that they need to do. And further, we need to do things ourselves like becoming more efficient in our use of energy, becoming er much less wasteful em...
Q: Low energy light...
Houghton: ...trying to, trying to...
Q: ...bulbs?
Houghton: ...recycle and trying to, trying to make things last longer, not just rushing out and buying the, the latest thing just because it's new. Trying to make much better use of our res...er the earth's resources, trying to travel more sensibly, trying to have cars that are much more efficient than the average car is on the whole at the moment. Trying not to go, not to fly too often when we can avoid that. Or if we do, we can pay an endor...y'know, pay a, er an offset fee in order to try to help others to cut down, to offset our carbon emissions by doing that. There are lots of things we can do - we can buy 'green electricity' now too.
Q: So this is - for you, this is a crusade isn't it?
Houghton: Mm-hm. Yes it is a sort of crusade. We have to persuade people to do that sort of thing. I'm not a great p...crusader in that sense, but I, but I try to provide information on which people can base the sort of things that they do and the sort of thing they're looking for. And we have also to, to learn to share more. And when I say 'share' - this is sharing with the developing world. The biggest impact of climate change will fall on the poorest in the world. They will get more floods and more droughts and many, many hundreds, millions possibly, will have to move homes to somewhere else. And where do they go? Big problem. How do we help them to survive where they are? How do we provide energy for them so that they can have a reasonable standard of living? And they, they want all those things. They want to use fossil fuels also to try to help in that.
Q: We can hardly legitimately say that they can't, simply...
Houghton: Of course not. We've got to ha...but we have to help them to do it in a sustainable way.
Q: D'you...
Houghton: So they, so that if they build coal fired power stations, they have to - as any of us who build coal fired power stations - if we do that any more we have to sequester the carbon or pump the carbon under the ground.
Q: But is this sustainable? I mean China is building power stations - coal fired power stations y'know - one every five days. I mean...
Houghton: Exactly.
Q: ...is it, is it, can it be stopped? Is it viable?
Houghton: We, we shouldn't try and stop them to do that. But what we've got to teach them to do - or work together with them to do - is to pump the carbon that they're emitting back into the ground. And that can be done. There are lots of places you can pump carbon into, under the rocks and the saline aquafers and things of this kind. So there is technology there, which can help to remove the problem of carbon emissions from coal fire power stations. And there is renewable energy, there's solar energy. I have a bank of solar cells on my garage roof which - and I love to see the meter going round, to see it coming in - that's only small of course. But there are lots of things that we can do and we've got to learn to do those things. And we also have to learn to...y'know use some of our wealth in the West to help those in the poor parts of the world to get sustainable energy and to adapt to this new climate that they're going to get - and all those things.
Q: But this is a new lifestyle for the West, and one that is counter to the burgeoning consumerism which at the moment is rampant and I wonder whether you imagine that people will take that on? Are people capable of this kind of generosity, self-sacrifice and so on? Is it economically, even politically viable to put this idea to people? They, they whinge when there's a mention of a tax.
Q: It's, it's an enormous challenge for the West, er for the world - especially for the western world. And even, and a particular challenge of course to the Christian world which I'm a bit close to. And I believe the Christian world could actually show the way - and some of us in the Christian world are trying to talk about how we can show the way by doing things ourselves and we haven't gotta wear the hair shirts all the time. We don't have to give away enormous sums of money. We can give away y'know much more than we do at the moment. And there are lots of people in the world too who are not Christians or religious people at all, who see the, see the moral imperative and who want to help in that too.
Q: Now what d'you say to the 'nay sayers' - the people who say 'This climate change, y'know - it's just a fad. It's just a, it's just a modish, political idea'? I mean quite a number of people initially resisted and went on record as saying that it was, it was bogus. And you've been a, the whole idea has been attacked, sometimes journalistically. But...
Houghton: Mm
Q: ...em, quite a number of Evangelicals in America felt the whole thing was, a charade. What d'you feel about that Evangelical point of view, which is... 'The Second Coming is due. Christ is about to return to the earth some time soon. We are ready to receive him. And what happens to the planet doesn't really concern us, because the Second Coming is...is due'?
Houghton: Well I don't see that as a, as a, as a view which is compatible with what's in the Bible actually, first of all, we've no idea when the Second Coming will occur. Jesus said 'I don't know when I'm coming back again,' and if He doesn't know, we've no right to try to put dates on it.
Q: You do believe He's coming back?
Houghton: I believe He's coming back, yes.
Q: As the same person? I mean will we...recognise Him walking the streets as they recognised Him on the Road to Emmaus?
Houghton: But He's coming back with a...y'know His, with His Resurrection body. If the, the story of the Resurrection is that Jesus came back, not as identical to what He was like before. He had a new body which was recognisable and which had new qualities and new potential. And that's the body He will come back in. And at the same time the, there will be a changed earth and a changed, we're told changed heavens as well. Now em, what that means I don't know. But I do y'know believe that there is something in the future that God has for the earth, and for humans. Em...which will be y'know, what we call Heaven actually. Jesus is coming back to earth to make that real, and that's what I believe is the Biblical story. Now putting flesh and bones on all that is very hard of course, putting detail on that I can't do, and I don't think anybody can really do that. But that is our expectation and our hope there is a future.
Q: You've spent...
Houghton: And we mustn't be, we mustn't try to be too prescriptive about it, because we'll get into great difficulties if we do that.
Q: Now you did also have another encounter. I've spoken about the Evangelicals resisting the idea of climate change. But you yourself had an important place in persuading a great many of them to recognise climate change. Can you tell me how that happened?
Houghton: Well it so happened that I met an American Professor of Ecology called Calvin de Witt who's a very distinguished ecologist. And he and I happened to walk in Windsor Great Park, because we were for a meeting in St George's House Windsor together, and talking about what we could do to persuade American Christians to take the earth seriously and care for Creation. He said 'Why don't we have a conference in Oxford and try and persuade some of them to come over,' and so we did. And at that conference we got a lot of scientists - not all Christians but they were, y'know good scientists. And we also had people like the Bishop of Liverpool speaking to us about the theology of it and creation care. And it had a big influence on one particular person called Richard Cizik, who was in a very key position in the National Association of Evangelicals. Which is a...
Q: In, in America.
Houghton: Mm, in America, that's right. And that's a body which has 50,000 churches and 25 percent of the American population within its remit. And he went away and tried to persuade his colleagues in that organisation with some difficulty, I think, because of the misinformation campaign. Er but nevertheless, he persisted and, and finally this year the 90 Evangelical leaders signed a statement - a very good statement on the, on climate change, saying that it was an important issue, and caring for the earth was an important Christian principle. Something we really had to do - which was a great statement for them to make - and also that action had to be taken about climate change.
Q: It's very interesting because we've, we've come to a situation in our society at the moment in which on the whole, it's felt that science and religion are opposed to each other, and that religious people are very suspicious and indeed the Evangelicals most particularly are suspicious of science. And science, scientists, many scientists reject the idea of there being any God at all, because they haven't accepted as you did from your background that there was a God and they reject it outright. How do you feel about that?
Houghton: Well scientists, many scientists are quite happy to talk about an intelligence behind the universe, which er, that you can call God and which some of them are happy to call God. Even Dawkins says he doesn't reject the idea of an intelligence behind the universe, because the laws of physics, the laws of nature are there, and they're not part of, part of what we invent as scientists at all. They're given, they're an absolute given em...
Q: But do you, but many scien...many scientists do reject the the idea of God, and they dislike religion. Do you think society needs religion, or d'you think religion could slip away, if we all behave very well?
Houghton: Well the reason I think why scientists dismiss God is, is because they object to a personal God. They are quite happy to have a God out there who made it all, and who perhaps is in some sense - remote sense - in charge. But the idea, as Stephen Hawking said on the Today programme very recently, said y'know 'I can't imagine that in our little corner - this little corner of the universe which is so minute and tiny, that God's got any interest in us.' Well I don't, that's not a scientific statement. Because another bit of science actually is that our brains are the most complex thing in the universe that we know. And if that is true, we're not, not sure of course - there may be other brains elsewhere in the universe. But our brains are more complex even than the, y'know the, the wonderful things that happen in the universe as a whole. So why do we dismiss humans as so unimportant? And why do we dismiss the idea of a personal God? Because you see if we have personality then to imagine somebody who's greater than we are, who's made the universe, who doesn't have personality, who you can't get to know, seems to me a non sequitur. It's something that doesn't follow at all.
Q: You don't think that perhaps the notion of God, the concept of God with all its, its ramifications of a very serious entity, could be the product of consciousness?
Houghton: That's er, er, that's an idea of course that, that people who talk about the development of the human mind and how consciousness comes. We don't know anything much about consciousness actually. We don't understand it scientifically, it's a very interesting problem, how our minds work and how our minds relate to our freedom of action and our consciousness. And how that relates to the physical part of the system. That's something we don't know too much about at the moment. Em, so to say, to suggest that our minds have made it up, and made up the idea of God out of nothing when y'know there's a very large proportion of the world's population who have an idea of God - and, and that - and a personal God at that. So to make a, a statement 'Well...it could've come that way,' is not a very scientific statement.
Q: Do you expect to survive this life in some other form?
Houghton: I believe in a life after death, yes. Because...
Q: What will it be like?
Houghton: Well the most important part of it is that it will be a life where we're much closer to God than we are here. Where we shall actually meet Jesus, where we shall know about God and we shall find out...many things we don't know at the moment at all. And it'll be a very exciting life I think. And where we...and which will be very dominated by love also. Y'know, the whole idea of love which is so important to religious belief and Christian belief in particular, to have something really dominated completely by love without anything to come to spoil it, would be, is a wonderful idea. And that I think is what the promise that we have in the Bible is. So em...I accept that as, as something that I'm looking forward to. If you ask me do I ever doubt that that's true - I...like anybody, any scientist I suppose I sometimes wonder, y'know, have I made all this up by some...in some strange way or complicated way, has it all been made up? But when reflecting on it, I, it's such a strong thing. I cannot escape from the belief that this is...not only important but absolutely vital to my existence and to my understanding of, of not only God Himself, but also my understanding of people and the universe. So it's something I can't escape from.
Q: And even the scientist in you doesn't ask for proof or want to examine or analyse or do a critique of the text or the tradition at all?
Houghton: Oh I want to analyse, I want to critique, I want to understand - I want to do all those things insofar as I'm able to do so. The scientist is in me - I accept that we have to y'know, look at all the evidence as far as we can, and as well as we can. I believe that y'know - people are doing that and there's lots of evidence around if we, if we're er... But that evidence of course has also to y'know...be related to experience. And putting those together is an important part of the Christian story and the scientific story too.
Q: Sir John Houghton, thank you.
Houghton: Thank you.
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