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WE MAY BE just exiting the winter from hell, but new research suggests that horrible flooding and general climate upheaval is set to be the ‘new-normal’ for Ireland.
The study, by among others Dr Conor Murphy of NUI Maynooth’s Department of Geography, states that periods of extreme temperature, rainfall and drought will become commonplace in Ireland in the near future.
Using data stretching back 150 years, the investigating team looked at the most extreme winters and summers on record here in an attempt to model the kinds of weather we can expect to deal with in the near future.
The conclusions are sobering:
Put a different way, 26 out of the last 30 years of this century are expected to be as warm as the hottest summer on record.
Or, more apocalyptically, the winter we’ve just been through is likely to be repeated on an eight-yearly basis. Oh dear… Climate change is real and knocking at our door it seems.
As the study says: “the ramifications of these changes are not to be taken lightly”.
Research has shown that exceptionally hot temperatures in an Irish context have a significant effect on the normal mortality rate in our temperate climate, while increasingly wet winters “imply a significant challenge for water resource management and agriculture”, a fact not likely to be lost on those Irish people who saw their homes and farms devastated by flooding last December.
“There is an undeniable need for us all to reduce our emissions and plan appropriately for climate change,” says one of the paper’s authors Dr Tom Matthews, previously of Maynooth and now at Liverpool John Moores University.
However, there’s a common perception that climate change is distant from people’s lives, and this reduces public engagement with the issue. The impetus behind this research was a desire to combat that.
“By contextualising climate change relative to extreme weather that people have observed in their own lifetimes, it is our hope that this research will provide a more tangible reference point for a wide range of audiences,” says Murphy.
Fingers crossed.
You can read the full report here.
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If the coronavirus hadn’t taken over Brexit is all we’d have been hearing about for the past 3 months……. I’m well aware of the importance of both but I’m sick of Brextit and Covod 19.
@Dec:
Well – As Leon T said:
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”
@Michael Kavanagh: A Trotsky quote to make a point re the advancement of capitalism…. however unlikely it may be it’s an excellent quote and very apt in this instance! It’s the reason we keep reading and commenting on Brexit and other such articles even when we’re completely disillusioned with them all!
‘The Duchy of Lancaster’…..God what is it with these people.
It just showed how much the readers of the journal are interested in brexit, this storey is up 2 hours and only 2 post about it. I got bord after the scend line .
@Heisen thing is there is nothing to comment on
“…which was illuminating in showing how little we still don’t know.”
Do you even read what you write?
Boris the Bluffer and his cronies have shown themselves up ti be as useless as most people outside the UK saw them to be.
1000 people a day dying from Covis-19 but they only count hospital deaths! It keeps the numbers low.
All the lies they told about Brexit are being shown as that
@Gary Kearney: there are not a thousand dying each day check worlometers
When the boy cried wolf he gained a reputation. British Perfidy has been around for hundreds of years. Indeed Stalin refused to believe the British when they warned him of imminent German onslaught. He thought they were lying. That’s what reputation does.
Embarrassing shambles, the entire affair. Full of lies and some misplaced Empire nostalgia nonsense. Johnson is a pathological liar and unfit to be the prime minister.
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