Why the UN’s climate change report is dedicated to an Evangelical Christian
The sixth report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is alarming – but not surprising.
The panel’s first assessment of scientific research on climate change in 1990 found that burning fossil fuels substantially increase the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, causing a rise in the global mean temperature and warming up the world’s oceans. The second, third, fourth, and fifth IPCC assessments found more evidence and growing consensus that human activity is causing climate change and that its impact will hurt a lot of people. The sixth assessment, released in August 2021, is more urgent and reaches the same conclusion – it is inevitable that climate change will have a significant impact on society.
‘The root problem of climate change is sin’
Policy makers, scientists, and concerned citizens who pick up the final version of the report might be surprised by one thing, though: it is dedicated to an Evangelical Christian who said the root problem of climate change is sin. “Looking after the Earth is a God-given responsibility,” John Houghton once wrote. “Not to look after the Earth is a sin.”
Houghton, who died of complications related to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief editor of the first three IPCC reports and an early, influential leader calling for action on climate change. His concerns about greenhouse gases, rising temperature averages, dying coral reefs, blistering heat waves, and increasingly extreme weather were informed by his training as an atmospheric physicist and his commitment to science. They also come out of his evangelical understanding of God, the biblical accounts of humanity’s relationship to creation, and what it means for a Christian to follow Christ.
“We haven’t lived up to the call to holiness,” Houghton’s granddaughter Hannah Malcolm explained to Christianity Today. “We’ve been conformed to the patterns of this world, with the desire for wealth accumulation and the desire to increase our comforts, and that’s not the demand that is placed upon us as followers of Christ.”
‘The biggest thing that can ever happen to anybody is to get a relationship with the Creator of the universe’
Houghton was born in a Baptist family in Wales in 1931. As a young man he realized he needed to make a personal decision for Christ, and he did. To the end of his life, Houghton described it as the most important choice he’d ever made. “The biggest thing that can ever happen to anybody is to get a relationship with the one who has created the universe,” Houghton told a Welsh newspaper in 2007. Houghton began attending Oxford University at 16, earning a bachelor’s in 1951 and a doctorate in 1955. He became one of the first scientists working on the problem of climate change, and a natural choice to chair the working group of the IPCC when it was set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN in 1988.
After the first report came out, it became clear to Houghton that careful science, carried out with the utmost transparency about levels of certainty, would not be enough to move the world’s governments to take action on climate change. There were too many short-term incentives to doubt warnings about devastating consequences that were far in the future. Houghton increasingly found himself called to the role of communicator to politicians and leaders. “Whenever he talked about it he would begin with ecological devastation and the question of justice was a constant reference point. I’ve heard people say he had the urgency of a prophet,” Malcolm said.
‘Humans are called to care for creation as gardeners’
In 1995, when the second IPCC assessment was published, Houghton started talking about climate change explicitly in terms of sin. He was influenced by John Zizioulas, the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan bishop of Pergamon, who argued that sins against nature were also sins against God, since humans were given God’s creation to care for. “Some Christians have misinterpreted the ‘dominion’ given to humans in Genesis 1:26 as an excuse for unbridled exploitation,” Houghton wrote. “However, the Genesis chapters, as do other parts of Scripture, insist that human rule over creation is to be exercised under God, the ultimate ruler of creation, with the sort of care exemplified by the picture of humans as ‘gardeners.’”
After the third and fourth IPCC reports, many advocates for dramatic cuts to carbon emissions began to despair. Change wasn’t happening quickly enough to make a difference. But Houghton, drawing from his faith, spoke frequently about the importance of Christian hope. “He believed the goodness of the Lord will be seen in the land of living, and that sustained him,” Malcolm said. He prayed regularly that God’s kingdom would come – “Fast!” – and set things right.
‘May God’s Kingdom come fast and set things right’
In retirement, Houghton returned to Wales, where he served as an elder at a Presbyterian Church and taught his grandchildren to love the Welsh mountains and windswept beaches. According to Malcolm, who is now preparing for ministry in the Church of England and writing a doctoral dissertation on theology and climate grief, Houghton thought it was impossible to convince people to protect something they didn’t love. He wanted Christians to learn to love their environment and let climate change science move them to repentance.
“Our desire to be gods drives a great deal of the destruction around us,” she said. “There is something in the work of climate science that reveals the consequence of our sin, troubles those in power, and calls for us to sit with that, but also be aware that an alternative is possible – an alternative to our sin.”
Houghton didn’t live to see the release of the sixth IPCC report or to promote it to Evangelical Christians. But the scientific assessment dedicated to his memory echoes a core theme of Houghton’s life’s work: Now is the time, it says, to turn from the path of destruction.
Source: Hannah Malcolm, Daniel Silliman, CT
