Gospel according to Sir John

The Times obituary of Sir John Houghton says as much about the paper as about the eminent environmental scientist.

Sir John was a fanatic of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) who co-chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the driving force behind the Kyoto treaty.

In recognition of this body’s achievement in drawing the world’s attention to warm weather, it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which distinction it shared with Al Gore and Yasser Arafat…

Sorry, slapdash research there. Yasser received his Nobel in 1994, and it was only Al who got a share of the 2007 accolade. Both awards, however, bolstered the credibility of the Nobel Committee no end.

The obituary was as eulogising as the genre requires. Also, whoever wrote it wasn’t reticent about letting his own views on the issue known. On purely professional grounds, I admire the skill involved in conveying bias with only a few words in a long article.

Thus, Sir John “spent his career getting people to listen to the scientific consensus on climate change”. It would be tedious to list all the scientists who stand outside that consensus, but trust me: the list is long.

Or, “Houghton persuaded the world to listen to what the vast majority of scientists were saying about climate change, namely that it was extremely likely that human activity was the main cause of it.” Ditto.

That a serious and widespread scientific opposition to AGW exists never got a mention. Instead, the reader was made to believe that the only opposition came from countries “whose economies rely on oil… those whose economies relied on revenue from fossil fuels… [and] some countries that, for reasons of self-interest, tried to obscure the growing evidence for anthropogenic climate change.”

All this is par for the course. One would be foolish to expect a liberal paper to buck the liberal consensus, and the writer’s bias is hardly worth a mention.

What does strike me as unfortunate, on the part of both the obituarist and his protagonist, is the attempt to use biblical references as justification for what’s so aptly called Gretinism.

Sir John was an evangelical Christian, which term I find misleading — all Christians are evangelical because Christ told them to be. However, the way that designation is used, it’s synonymous with ‘fundamentalist Christian’ and hence also with ‘rubbish at theology’.

Those chaps can twist the scripture into supporting any message whatsoever. All it takes is a nimble mind, and, by the sound of him, Sir John’s was as nimble as they come.

Thus, says the obituary, “He… thought that Christians were obliged to act on climate change by their duty to be Good Samaritans, as it would affect poorer countries more than rich ones.”

This is nonsense on several levels, not all of them theological. What would affect poorer countries is the removal of fossil fuels, which provide 85.5 per cent of world energy. Obliterating them would lead to famines, epidemics and violence all over the globe, but especially in its downmarket part.

Scientists, those outside the aforementioned consensus, estimate the likely death toll of that exercise at somewhere between one and two billion souls. Not very Good Samaritan, is it?

Then, claims the obituary, Sir John believed that “God commanded humanity to look after the planet in Genesis 1: 28.”

According to that verse, “… God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”.

Deriving the Kyoto treaty from this verse takes no mean sleight of hand. The operative words there are subdue and dominion. These words [in the original, kabash (כָּבַשׁ) and radah (רָדָה) respectively] mean that the Earth was created for man to rule, dominate and use for his own ends.

Employing the obituarist’s language, this interpretation is based on consensus formed by the vast majority of theologians. The Earth and everything in it is there to serve man, not the other way around.

That doesn’t preclude responsible environmentalism: for the Earth to fulfil its God-given mission, it should be used rationally and lovingly. The nature of the argument here is exactly what practices are consistent with that goal, and the consensus on that is nowhere near universal.

Like most things these days, this issue has become thoroughly politicised. By way of proof, try this test on anybody you know.

Ask him a series of political questions designed to establish where on the right-left spectrum he belongs. In nine cases out of ten, you’ll find that those on the right won’t be suffering from Gretinism, and those on the left will.

Since the second group is more numerous, active and vociferous, it has succeeded turning this issue into an ideological battleground. The late Sir John Houghton was in the vanguard of the wrong side, for whatever reason. One can only wish he hadn’t used the Bible as a weapon of mass instruction.

Sir John Houghton, RIP