Fear of storms ‘lies deep in Irish psyche’ - and with good reason

Climate change will ensure the word “unprecedented” wears thin. It was used abundantly this week as the water levels rose to frightening levels in various parts of the country. When meteorologist Brendan McWilliams, who penned the popular Weather Eye column in this newspaper from 1988, wrote his final column before his death in 2007, he noted the shift in weather that October usually brought. It was a “turning of the year ... colder, wetter, darker and windier ... a reminder to us of the rigours of returning weather.” Those rigours are getting alarming these days and the government’s increased “humanitarian” package of €13 million to assist flood victims will be seen as chicken feed.

McWilliams was well tuned to climate change and had served from 1998 to 2000 on an EU advisory group on the issue. His second last column in 2007 referred to the Carlow-born scientist John Tyndall under the headline “Carlow’s father of global warming”, a reference to Tyndall’s work in 19th-century Britain detecting that changes in the composition of the atmosphere could cause climate variations, what was later referred to as the “greenhouse effect”. McWilliams also pointed to another pioneer in this area, Sweden’s Svante Arrhenius, who calculated that human emission of carbon dioxide would increase the temperature of the Earth.

The difference between then and now was that this warming was seen by Arrhenius positively, as something that would prevent another ice age and help food production. What was striking, suggested McWilliams, was how after Arrhenius’s death in 1927 interest in climate change caused by humans “was virtually dormant” until the late 1980s.

Eugene Huzar predicted in 1855 that in ‘one or two hundred years’, emissions from modern industrialism would ‘disturb the harmony of the world’

McWilliams’s column was so popular because of our obsession with the weather. That is not a modern preoccupation. In 2021 the Royal Irish Academy published a book edited by historian James Kelly and archaeologist Tomás Ó Carragáin, Climate and Society: From Prehistory to the Present. It was overdue; as they pointed out, historians too have been slow to grasp this issue and give it the prominence needed to provide context for what we are currently witnessing. Ireland “more than any other [country] suffers from storms of wind and rain”, wrote Gerald of Wales in his History and Topography of Ireland, based on observations from his Irish visits in 1183 and 1185, constituting “what is probably the first reasonably detailed extant account of Ireland’s climate”. Sometimes, the accounts were about Ireland’s relative fortune; consider the report by an Irish newspaper in 1787 that farms on the banks of “all the country rivers” had suffered “great damage” due to flooding caused by “the late rains”. But the same observer could declare that “Ireland, happily ... does not experience those hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes, which terrify the minds of the inhabitants” of other countries. The book also includes the words of French lawyer and author of The End of the World by Science, Eugene Huzar, who lamented in 1855 that “Civilisation inevitably runs to its end with a blindfold over its eye”, predicting that in “one or two hundred years” emissions from modern industrialism would “disturb the harmony of the world”.

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Contemporary climatologist John Sweeney suggests that “consistent with its position as an island in the northwestern periphery of Europe, climate has always been a major preoccupation in Ireland”. The fear of the storm “lies deep in the Irish psyche” and most storms tend to be felt on a national scale. Rather than impressions, we now have an abundance of data to show the scale of climate change. Ireland in 2020 was at least 0.5 degrees warmer than during 1961-1990, with 6 per cent more rain recorded from 1981-2010 than in 1961-1990, while 2006-2015 was the wettest 10-year period in more than 300 years, and the winter of 2013-2014 “the stormiest for at least 143 years”. Sweeney points out that the warmth of our waters this year means it holds “a lot more vapours, arriving on our shores supercharged”.

A report this week argues ‘it is inevitable that we will be faced with the need to co-ordinate a managed retreat strategy, as the safest, most appropriate response in certain cases to rising sea levels’

In 2008, UCC geographer Robert Devoy noted that analyses of Europe’s coastal vulnerability to sea-level rise placed Ireland in a relatively low risk category. Nonetheless, from the 1980s there was an extensive literature on coastal vulnerability, which, Devoy suggested, given ongoing climate change, required bottom-up approaches and local-regional scale planning. The EU floods directive of 2010 required assessment and mapping of all areas where significant floods could occur and the engagement of the public.

This week’s report on National Coastal Change Management Strategy observed that “even with comprehensive monitoring systems and a policy of appropriate intervention, it is inevitable that we will be faced in some circumstances with the need to co-ordinate a managed retreat strategy, as the safest, most appropriate response in certain cases to rising sea levels”.

These matters require a “supercharged” response and the lifting of blindfolds as things will get worse, quickly.