So far this month in Munster and Leinster there has not been a single April shower worthy of the name. Indeed the last rain of any consequence in these regions fell on March 24th, and as the dry spell continues, following a winter during which the total rainfall over much of the country was less than 75 per cent of average, the spectre of severe water shortage stalks the land. The drought continues a pattern that has been common in recent years - relatively short, very wet spells, often with interludes of flooding, interspersed with long periods when there is very little rain at all Irish norms.
Some informed observers see these anomalies as ominous. They also view them in the context of what they perceive as an unusually high frequency of "extreme" weather events world-wide in recent years: they cite the all-time record number of Caribbean hurricanes in 1995, and the long hot, almost freakish, summer here in Ireland that same year; they remember the Mississippi floods of 1993, the inundation of the Netherlands and the flooding in Galway in 1995, and the repeat performance in Clonmel in 1996. Meanwhile, across the water, the last two years have been the driest in England since reliable records began over 200 years ago. These astute watchers of the elements can remind you of many more examples, and they say the conclusion must be obvious: global warming has begun to change our weather.
Many would argue, of course, that this is no bad thing. Indeed the most benign hypothesis of an Irish greenhouse world seems a consummation devoutly to be wished, being a gradual and orderly rise in average Irish temperatures over the next 100 years or so in line with the currently predicted global average increase of about 2C. This should be the equivalent, this happy theory goes, of moving Ireland three or four hundred miles to thee south, to end up miraculously, as it were, somewhere near the valley of the River Loire. Many crops currently ungrowable in Ireland would become viable, agricultural production would soar, we would have long glorious summers like 1995 in perpetuity, and our beaches would rival those of Nice and San Tropez. "Chateau Wexford" would be a vivacious, perky little vintage.
But this may well be an unduly rosy view of even the most optimistic of the range of possibilities. The downside is that the rise in average temperature might well lead to a substantial increase in rainfall during the winter months, balanced by long summer droughts much worse than anything we know at present; arid summers might be interrupted by catastrophic flash floods as the occasional thundery deluge descends upon a parched terrain unable to cope with such a sudden onslaught; and the extra rainfall during our wet, wet winters could turn the central plains of Ireland into one vast untropical lagoon, with the former dwellings of the unfortunate inhabitants protruding above a liquid landscape like so many grim palazzi in a bleak Orwellian caricature of Venice.
Large areas of Dublin, Cork and Belfast, we are told, could also be subject to frequent, if not permanent, inundation as the sea rises inexorably around our Irish coastline. And much of the impact would be associated with very severe storms, which some authorities believe might well be more frequent in a greenhouse world.
If that seems grim, the worst scenarios are little short of terrifying. Some experts caution that the global climate system is extremely complex and may not necessarily respond in a gradual and orderly way to any increases in temperature that might be brought about by a rise in carbon dioxide concentrations: it may resist change for quite some time, they say, and then "flip" very suddenly. So instead of a gentle change from our Irish mists to a balmy Mediterranean regime, there might, they say, be a sudden lurch to almost desert conditions as the many feed-back mechanisms, collectively reinforcing the initial stimulus, bring our climate almost to the boil.
These harpers on the mournful string remind us that the broad-ocean of trackless, burning, virtually lifeless sand that we know as the Sahara Desert was not always so 8,000 years ago, while the last vestiges of the Ice Age maintained their chilly hold on northern Europe, it was a hospitable region whose flowing rivers teemed with fish, and whose grassy valleys were able to sustain a wide variety of animal and human life. Places and climates have been known to change dramatically.
And then there is the other Armageddon. Although there is now a broad convergence of opinion as regards the likely trends in average global temperature, no one denies that there is great uncertainty concerning possible regional departures from this global mean. The averages, it is feared, may mask even more dramatic warming in some regions - the neo-Sahara scenario above - to be balanced by other places that may flip, dramatically and paradoxically, to a much colder and more harsh regime.
A favourite scenario of the catastrophe-horreur school of climatology is that which predicts that the fresh water being added to the northern waters of the North Atlantic by the melting polar ice in a greenhouse world, could affect the buoyancy of the water in sub-arctic regions. This, they theorise, could disrupt the natural tendency of the ocean waters in these regions to sink and make way for the northward drift of warm surface waters from the south. In effect, they argue, it could divert the Gulf Stream from our western shores and deprived of its benign influence, Ireland might develop a summer climate similar to Iceland's, and experience winters of the kind we now associate with the less hospitable regions of the Baltic Sea.
So who should we believe - the Cassandras or the cheery optimists? There are four relevant questions to be answered as far as climate change and global warming are concerned: Is the temperature of the world really rising? If so, is the rise attributable to manmade emissions into the atmosphere? In either case, is it having an effect upon our weather? And if so, what will these effects be in the future? A whole spectrum of opinion exists on each of these issues, ranging from many highly-respected scientists who would answer "No!" to all except the first, through a large, selectively agnostic gathering in the middle ground, to an equally respected group who are convinced that emphatic affirmatives are justified in response to nearly all such questions by all the evidence available.
"Yes" to the first is fairly well established. The average global temperature has been observed to have risen by the best part of a degree Celsius since the middle of the last century. It is also true, whether due to a greenhouse effect of anthropogenic origin or not, that the rate of increase has accelerated in the last 15 years. Indeed the record for the world's warmest year was broken no less than five times during the 1980s - in 1980,1981,1983, 1987 and again in 1988 - and the trend has continued into the 1990s, with 1995, as we know, being the warmest year on record.
As regards the reasons for this rise, the consensus of opinion has changed in recent times. Five years ago most scientists believed that it was still too soon to tell, but the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the official gurus and the most widely accepted authority on the subject, came to the carefully worded but very significant conclusion that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on the global climate". And as far as the future is concerned, the IPCC says say that if greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at current rates, the average temperature of the globe is likely to increase by something like 2C over the next 100 years or so. Their best guess as regards sea level is a rise of somewhere between 30cm and one metre by the end of the next century.
And are the observed increases in the average global temperature having an effect upon our current weather? On this question the consensus still is that we do not know, and that there is certainly no evidence to link any of the extreme weather events of recent times directly, in any causal way, to global warming. But here too, there has been a subtle culture-change within the scientific community. In the late 1980s, most scientists with the knowledge and the information to make an informed judgment on these matters were cautious: the basic science was admitted to be sound, but with the relatively simplistic climate models of the time, the reaction was almost universally one of "wait and see". The doctrine of natural variability of climate" was widely preached.
After all, they would point out, even in historical times the significant changes in our climate have been palpable: a warm dry period coinciding with the Norman invasions of these islands was followed by the Little Ice Age, the period from around 1450 until the early 1800s when the winters were much harsher and more severe than those we know today, and the summers generally dull and wet. The Irish and British winters depicted by the artists of the Georgian era and before, contrast strongly with the milder versions familiar to us now - and all this without any help from an enhanced greenhouse effect or "global warming" as we understand the term today. Rainfall, too, varies naturally over the decades for reasons that are not always easy to identify, the "Dust Bowl" years in the Midwest of the United States during the 1930s being a case in point.
But in 1997 it is probably true to say that a majority of scientists, while they may not all subscribe to the more extreme scenarios, when pushed will agree that, yes, something unusual is happening to the global climate. Ultimately, however, whether you believe that droughts of the kind we are experiencing at present, and other weather traumas, are set to become a regular feature of our future climate here in Ireland, depends on at which point on the scientific spectrum of opinion you find the views most plausible. Perhaps in the end, the words of the late Austin Bourke, one time director of Met Eireann may turn out to have been not just accurate, but prophetic: "The place of the Irish climate in our economy is much like that of the reliable husband and good provider in the domestic scene: a little lacking perhaps in superficial glamour and gaiety compared with some foreign Lotharios, but constituting a steady support whose contribution is not really appreciated until it is withdrawn."