"We're Doing God's Science"

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Houghton and his wife, Sheila, live in a renovated farmhouse on a hillside overlooking a broad, calm estuary where the river Dovey empties into Cardigan Bay. The "Aber" in Aberdovey is Welsh for "mouth of the river." Outward Bound, the outdoor education program, began in Aberdovey in 1941. One of the school's original buildings still stands on the hillside below Houghton's home. I spend the night in their guesthouse, once a barn, and I awake in the morning to find a small refrigerator stocked with cereal, fruit, eggs, milk, and orange juice from Cuba with a fair-trade logo on the carton. Houghton's wife, it turns out, owns a small fair-trade shop in a neighboring town.

After breakfast, and before setting off on our hike, Houghton and I talk for a while in a sitting room with sweeping views of the bay and river. Beyond the Dovey, hazy, serried ranks of hills rise over the bay. A light breeze ferries low gray clouds inland from the sea; the tide is coming in, gradually covering the river's sandbars as Houghton talks quietly, almost shyly, about his religious beliefs, and how he sees no need to separate them from his career as a scientist.

"The science we're doing is God's science," he says. "If we find things out about the world, we're finding out about God's universe and the way he runs it, while recognizing that there are many things we don't understand. You wonder how things fit, and sometimes we have to say we don't know. One of the most important statements a scientist can make is 'I don't know.' And one of the most important statements a theologian can make is 'I don't know.' There are so many things we don't know and so many things to find out, which is why it's such an interesting place, the universe."

But there are some things scientists know all too well, and one of them is that the world is growing inexorably warmer. By the end of this century the average global temperature is expected to increase by 2 to 6 degrees centigrade (3.5 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit).

Houghton believes that an increase of 2 degrees centigrade over the preindustrial average is probably inevitable. It's also a number that would be perilous to exceed. "If we get up to 3 degrees, the damage becomes much greater," he says. "The evidence is that 2 degrees is about the limit. Are we running out of time? The answer is yes. If we want to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees, the peak in our emission of greenhouse gases has to occur in 2015. We have seven years. Now, is that going to happen? If there is political will, we'll do it."

Houghton stands up and suggests we set out for our hike. So we get into his Prius, a 2001 model, the first year the car was available outside Japan, and drive along the coast for about 20 minutes to a trailhead at Dolgoch Falls, a series of three waterfalls that spill through a wooded ravine near an old narrow-gauge railroad.

As we walk uphill, Houghton talks about his childhood. His father was a school principal in North Wales. His mother taught mathematics. "My father was a very devout Christian man, a Baptist with strong conservative views," he says. "He was very much an anti-evolutionist. He thought it was just completely incompatible with any Christian belief. From an early age that seemed wrong to me. Because if you believe this is God's universe, and science is studying what the universe is all about, then there can't be a conflict."

Houghton attended Oxford on a full scholarship. He was a freshman in 1948, a time when the university was filled with men returning to school after the war. "I was a slightly lost teenager amongst these older men," he says. "But they were very nice chaps, and guided me. I joined a Christian union group, which was a great help in thinking through my faith and in supporting my intuition that religious faith is not incompatible with a scientific outlook."

Houghton gave his first lecture on global warming in 1967, nine years before he became a professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford. At the time only a handful of scientists were studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere. Houghton and his colleagues saw the gas's warming effect as an interesting scientific problem, not a nascent threat.

Two developments ended that age of innocence. One was the advent of satellites, which allowed scientists to monitor the entire atmosphere. The second was the development of powerful computers for modeling climate change. "Satellites opened our eyes to a measurement future that we just couldn't have imagined," Houghton says. "We had been getting measurements from aircraft, balloons. Now here was a vehicle going around the world, looking at the whole world twice a day!"

By the 1980s, evidence was mounting that human actions were affecting the climate on a global scale. In 1988, Houghton was invited to co-chair the IPCC's scientific working group. It was while serving on the IPCC, says Houghton, that his religious outlook began to seriously inform his scientific work. "Among the people working on science for the IPCC, there were some I knew to be Christians. We talked about the moral side of climate change too. We prayed that we might succeed in doing an honest job. That was a great solace for me."

Houghton is emphatic that there can be no contradiction between his faith and his work as a scientist. He said, "More and more as I worked on the IPCC reports, I began to examine the consequences of what we in the developed world were doing, and I realized that global warming was something the rich were responsible for. The moral imperative to do something about it is very, very strong. The developed world has to take the first action in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That part is inescapable."

When the panel issued its second report in 1995, 80 governments had signed off on it. That report reached a cautious conclusion, summarized in one sentence that required more than an hour of haggling before it was finally approved: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate."

Last year the IPCC released its fourth major report. It concluded that the evidence for global warming was "unequivocal" and that human contributions were "very likely" to blame. It also stated that with immediate action the world could avoid many of the worst consequences.

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