John Houghton, 88: Sounded the alarm on climate change

John Houghton, a climate scientist and influential figure in the United Nations panel that brought the threat of climate change to the world’s attention and received a Nobel Prize, died on April 15 in Dolgellau, Wales. He was 88.

The cause was complications of the novel coronavirus, according to his granddaughter Hannah Malcolm, who announced the death, at a hospital, on Twitter.

A key participant in the U.N. Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change, Houghton was the lead editor of the organization’s first three reports, issued in 1990, 1995 and 2001. With each report, the evidence underpinning global warming and the role humans play in causing it grew more ineluctable, and the calls for international action became more pressing. The group received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Al Gore, the former vice president and climate campaigner.

Speaking about climate change in 1994, Houghton said that delay served no one. “We should start to do what we can do now and also begin to plan to do more” he said, and “not wait 10 or 20 years till things are more clear.”

Gore recalled Houghton in a statement as “a critical voice bringing the urgency of the climate crisis to the attention of policymakers.”

“He took seriously the responsibility of scientists to not only produce research,” Gore added, “but also to help ensure that the public world understood the implications of that research.”

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and member of the

U.S. National Academy of Sciences, said in an email: “He understood earlier than most, and was willing to tell the politicians, that climate change was real and a threat not just to the richer countries, but especially to the poorer ones.”

Religion was central to Houghton’s life. In his autobiography “In the Eye of the Storm” (2013, with Gill Tavner), he said: “It was increasingly clear to me that the universe is God’s creation. As science was the means by which I would be able to explore and describe God’s creative work,

I could not see how there could possibly be conflict between science and faith.”

Houghton provided a spark that led to a climate movement within the evangelical community. In 2002, the Rev. Rich Cizik, an American evangelical leader, heard Houghton speak at the University of Oxford in England and had a “conversion on climate change so profound that he likened it to an ‘altar call,’ when nonbelievers accept Jesus as their savior,” The New York Times wrote in 2005.

John Theodore Houghton

was born in Dyserth, Wales, on Dec. 30, 1931, to Sidney and Miriam (Yarwood) Houghton. His father was a history teacher, and his mother taught mathematics before becoming a homemaker. At 16, John received a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1948.

“Not only was I 16,” he wrote in the autobiography, “but I was a rather young 16 from a strict Christian background, with very little experience of anything other than home.”

But he made his way,