Only a day or two ago I learned that Hubert Lamb had died. I first heard of him when I was a youngster of only nine or 10, when he was often recalled not for his eminence as a climatologist but for his bemusing eccentricity. More than a decade previously, during what we now call the Emergency, Lamb had spent some time at Valentia Observatory and gave the locals much amusement by wearing skimpy shorts from time to time, and by indulging a temporary passion for canoeing - both modes of behaviour which were quite unknown in Kerry more than 50 years ago.
At that time Lamb was a mere stripling in his 20s. He was one of a number of meteorologists from Britain who had been lent, as it were, to the fledgling Irish Meteorological Service to get it under way.
He trained many of the future leaders of Met Eireann, before going on to worldwide fame in climatology.
Lamb's first major contribution to the science was in 1950, when he published a classic paper on weather types and natural seasons in these islands, outlining what was to become the Lamb Weather Type classification, still widely used today. But his most enduring legacy was in the history of climate.
Before Lamb's time climate was thought of as a relatively constant feature of a given region; it was he who, almost single-handedly, first alerted the world to the inconstant, fickle nature of our global climate.
In his work at the Meteorological Office, and later as founding director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia during the 1970s, Lamb set about the formidable task of reconstructing the world's climates of centuries gone by.
He not only analysed conventional meteorological rec ords in his search, but also trawled vast oceans of private diaries, official papers, works of literature and the resources of many other disciplines, assembling the jigsaw piece by piece, until a coherent and recognisable pattern emerged.
His magnum opus was Climate: Present, Past and Future, a standard work of reference for all engaged in climatology and climate change research.
Considering his role as the apostle of a changing climate, it was ironic that as the world at large became more and more aware of threatened global warming Lamb himself remained conservative, maintaining a guarded attitude to the climatological importance of man-made greenhouse gases.
He felt that the extent of the natural variability of our climate was often underestimated.
Hubert Horace Lamb, of climatologists the undisputed primus inter pares, died at the age of 83 on June 28th this year.