It is easy to get one's royal academies mixed up. The Royal Hibernian Academy caters for the arts and was established in 1823. But the other one is half-a-century its senior: the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin was founded in 1785 by royal charter of King George III, and nicely describes itself as a society for "promoting the study of science, polite literature and the antiquities". It is into this latter ambience that Ray Bates will descend next Monday evening.
Every so often the Royal Irish Academy holds a discourse. The topic on May 24th will be meteorology, or to be more precise, "Stabilising and Destabilising Mechanisms in the Global Climate System".
The talk - for that, if one is to boldly nominate a spade a spade, is what a discourse is - will be given by Prof Ray Bates, who has nothing to do with the Irish National Lottery, but almost au contraire, is a professor of meteorology at the University of Copenhagen.
It begins at 8 p.m. at the academy's premises in Dawson Street, and for the occasion hoi polloi will be allowed into those hallowed halls.
Prof Bates, of course, is Irish, not a Dane. His father used to cox the local lifeboat down in Kilmore Quay, and from Wexford Ray progressed via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to end Part 1 of an eminent career as assistant director of Met Eireann.
Many people crown an achievement such as this by going into space, and so Ray emigrated to America, to a senior position at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and finally ended up in Copenhagen.
Monday's discourse will focus on a concept known to meteorologists as "feedback". In a "machine" as complex as our atmosphere, no change takes place in isolation, and a sequence of effects may reinforce one another, or may tend to cancel each other out. If a small initial change gains momentum, we have what is called positive feedback; if, like a pendulum, the system tends to return to the status quo, there is negative feedback.
Both are possible in the case of the so-called greenhouse effect; negative feedback provides stability, but too much positive feedback could render the world's climate system liable to lurch from ice age into torrid heat, or vice versa.
At present there is no scientific consensus as to which of the two, positive or negative feedback, is likely to be dominant in a greenhouse world. But maybe Prof Bates has inside information, so hurry along to hearken to his discourse at the RIA.