Climate change scientist, Sir John Houghton at the report launch Photo: Christian Aid/Robin Prime
'As Christians we are here to care of the Earth.'

At the launch of the Christian Aid Week report, Sir John Houghton, one the world’s leading climate change scientists, spoke passionately to Andy Jackson about the need to halt climate change from both a secular and Christian perspective, and the need for the United States to sign up to the Kyoto protocol.

Sir John Houghton is one the world’s leading climate change scientists. A former co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sir John was recently named as Laureate for the Japan Prize, in recognition of his work on global warming, climate change and sustainable energy.

In the 1970s he started studying the Earth’s atmosphere and in 1990 he established the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, to pursue research and to study climate change. He was chief executive of the Meteorological Office from 1998 – 2002 and is currently chair of the John Ray Initiative, an educational charity designed to bring together scientific and Christian understanding.

What is the IPCC?
The IPCC was formed by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. It joins weather services together. The job of the IPCC is to carry out thorough scientific assessments of the climate change issue and its impact on humans.

I became chairman of their scientific assessment group in 1988 and I did that until 2002, where we involved hundreds of scientists from around the world as it was a global subject, from all disciplines, and we involved as many as we can as we wanted real consensus reports, and we published three reports, in 1990, 1995 and 2001. As an intergovernmental body, our final summary reports were agreed by meetings of government delegates.

Our 2001 report had government and scientific delegates from 99 countries present, who agreed the report, sentence by sentence, so it has that degree of refereeing and approval, by all of the important nations of the world, including the US and Saudi Arabia, and we had hard discussions and hard arguments but everyone in the end agreed. It was a consensus report.

How much of a hindrance is the refusal of the United States in signing up to the Kyoto Protocol to solving the problems of climate change?
An enormous hindrance. They are the biggest country in the world, the biggest polluter in the world, 25% of carbon dioxide emissions come from the United States and still increasing, they will be 30% higher in 2010 than they were in 1990, and they are making little attempt to cut them down.

They are putting a lot of effort into technology, renewable energy sources and that sort of thing, but they have got to do very much more to cut down their emissions to something approaching to what the rest of the world is doing. American emissions are double what the emissions are from Europe. If they continue to say that there isn’t a problem then that’s a very big problem. It’s very important to get them on board.

Why is climate change an issue for Christians?
As Christians we are here to care of the Earth. If you read the early chapters of The Bible, you will discover that we were put on Earth to care for it. Genesis chapter 2 verse 15 says that we are to care for the garden, and we have that responsibility. But we’re not caring for the garden, we are spoiling it, raping the garden, even, because there are so many of us, we are using the garden in a very improper way, and as Christians we should be very concerned about that.

But not just looking after the garden and other parts of creation but also looking after each other. It’s the poor people of the world, as we’ve discovered from the emphasis of the Christian Aid Week report, who are really suffering, by burning fossil fuels, and creating problems, and that’s a very strong Christian imperative.

Christians really should be in the lead in the world about this and that goes for American Christians too. I’ve spent time with American Christians trying to persuade them that this really is an issue that they should be involved in and some of them are realising this. I hope we can turn more of them around to seeing that this is a world problem.

The problem in America is that they’ve had so much misinformation for so long, pushed out by the oil companies and the coal companies, and they don’t think it’s a problem, and that has to be changed. It will take some time.

• Christian Aid Week report: The climate of poverty: facts, fears and hope
• The launch of the climate change report videos

• Professor Richard Odingo interview
• Christian Aid Week 2006