Forgive Him, Lord, He Knows Not What He Said

Former director of the Met Office, former chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, and former co-chair of the International Commission on Climate Change, Sir John Houghton, is throwing a right hissy fit about something attributed to him by Dr Benny Peiser of Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation.

He wants an apology.

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing about my work as the chair of the first IPCC Scientific Assessment , quotes me as saying: "Unless we announce disasters no one will listen," thereby attributing to me and the IPCC an attitude of hype and exaggeration. That quote from me is without foundation. I have never said it or written it.

Although it has spread on the internet, I do not know its origin. In fact I have frequently argued the opposite, namely that those who make such statements are not only wrong but counterproductive. This quote is doing damage not only to me as a responsible scientist but also to the IPCC which in its main conclusions has always worked to avoid exaggeration. I demand from Dr Peiser an apology that he failed to check his sources and a public retraction of the use he made of the fabricated quotation.

Sir John Houghton
Hadley Centre
Meteorological Office, Exeter

He must have surely forgotten a Telegraph article in 1995 entitled "Me and My God".

Houghton warns that God may induce man to mend his ways with a disaster. “God tries to coax and woo, but he also uses disasters. Human sin may be involved; the effect will be the same. If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster."

Not the same at all, is it?

H/T John Adams