John Houghton is UK's Al Gore; both areapocalytic Christians and Greens.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...ever-said.html

Might the beginning of Lent not be an appropriate time for a little repentance, asks Christopher
Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:45PM GMT 20 Feb 2010

As the roof continues to fall in on them, in an endless succession of scandals, the beleaguered
defenders of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have at last managed to mount a
riposte by coming up with a "scandal" of their own. Under the headline "fabricated quote used to
discredit climate scientist", The Independent recently trumpeted that a quotation attributed by
"climate sceptics" to Sir John Houghton - one of the IPCC's founders and long a key figure in the
production of its increasingly alarmist reports as chairman of its scientific Working Group I - was
an invention. Sir John was now insisting, as he again did in a letter to last week's Observer, that
he never said it or anything like it.

The sentence the former head of the UK Met Office now denies ever using - although in the past four
years it has been cited unchallenged more than 100,000 times on the internet - was "unless we
announce disasters, no one will listen". In what looked like a concerted operation, Sir John's
disclaimer was circulated to sympathetic journalists across the world, along with demands for
corrections and apologies issued to various prominent "climate sceptics" who had publicly quoted
the remark, including Dr Benny Peiser, director of Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation,
Roger Helmer MEP, Lord Monckton, and the Australian geologist Professor Bob Carter.

It was also asked, through this paper, that I publish a correction, because I quoted the sentence
in my recent book The Real Global Warming Disaster - although I have never done so in these pages.
Like many others, I was misled by the internet into assuming the quote, attributed to a book
written by Sir John in 1994, was genuine, and that it must have been removed from the later edition
I used when compiling my own account of the global warming story. Naturally, in the face of Sir
John's insistence that he never said it, we shall all in due course take steps to correct the
record, as I shall do in the next edition of my book.

But what also came to light, thanks to that admirable expert on "risk", Professor John Adams, and
Professor Philip Stott, who for years was almost the only voice critical of climate hysteria in the
British press, is an interview Sir John gave to The Sunday Telegraph in its "Me and My God" slot on
September 10, 1995. As a fervent evangelical Christian, Sir John claimed that global warming might
well be one of those disasters sent by God to warn man to mend his ways ("God tries to coax and woo
but he also uses disasters"). He went on: "If we are to have a good environmental policy in the
future, we will have to have a disaster".

Maybe these are not quite the words that have been so widely misquoted. But if Sir John believes it
is time for us all to don sackcloth and ashes, perhaps he himself could meditate on the way in
which, a few years back, he was tireless in promoting the notorious "hockey stick" graph, used by
the IPCC to fool the world into thinking that global temperatures had lately been soaring to levels
unprecedented in history. This turned out to be the greatest scientific error in the IPCC's
history.

Even after the "hockey stick" had been devastatingly exposed as no more than the result of trickery
with a computer program, an "invention" far more damaging than any misquoting of his own words, Sir
John was still defending it in front of the US Congress as if it were gospel truth. As a
propagandist, he might still do the same today. But as a Christian scientist, might the beginning
of Lent not be an appropriate time for him to engage in a little repentance of his own?