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Yes, these grey skies are ‘global warming’

Ireland’s experience of climate change is relatively benign in comparison to other countries where extreme heat is leading to wildfires, drought and death. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening here too

Despite the gloomy and cool conditions Ireland’s climate is changing in line with the predictions of climate science. File photograph: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie
Despite the gloomy and cool conditions Ireland’s climate is changing in line with the predictions of climate science. File photograph: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie
Sadhbh O'Neill
Tue Jul 30 2024 - 06:00

We may get a few days of sunshine this week, but summer 2024 will be remembered as a season for hot water bottles, woolly jumpers and raincoats. After months of heavy grey clouds it may be hard to believe that climate change – or more accurately – global “heating” is having any effect on Ireland. There are probably few among us who wouldn’t mind if Ireland warmed up by a few degrees.

According to Met Éireann, June had lower temperatures than average and was the coldest since June 2015. Yet despite the gloomy and cool conditions Ireland’s climate is changing in line with the predictions of climate science. According to Met Éireann’s State of the Irish Climate report for 2023 last year was the warmest year on record for Ireland, and also the wettest year according to records going back to 1900 and 1941 respectively. 2023 saw the wettest March and wettest July on record, and five months experienced over 135 per cent of their long-term average rainfall, mostly during the second half of the year.

For most of us excessive rainfall is an unwelcome nuisance. But for farmers wet spring and autumn periods can impact on grazing of grasslands and the sowing and harvesting of crops, leading to reduced productivity, lower milk yields and higher costs. The entire business model for Irish agricultural exports is reliant on a stable climate but this is no longer guaranteed.

Nonetheless, Ireland’s experience so far of climate change is relatively benign in comparison to other countries where extreme heat is leading to wildfires, drought and death, according to attribution studies. Rising temperatures and a severe lack of rainfall have intensified and expanded progressively across Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia this year, leading to livestock losses, malnutrition and acute food insecurity right now for over 6 million people in Zimbabwe alone.

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While the sub-Saharan drought is linked to both climate change and the El Niño cycle, existing vulnerabilities mean that up to 2 billion people in the region are vulnerable to increased water and food insecurity, infectious diseases and even gender-based violence, sexual exploitation and abuse.

Whatever the weather here the state of the world’s climate should be keeping us awake at night. Sea levels reached new record highs, with notable acceleration over the past three decades. Recent estimates put the cost of sea-level rise in the UK and EU at €872 billion by 2100, and the Irish Government is already considering policies to support a “managed retreat” from vulnerable coastlines. With around 40 per cent of people in Ireland living within 5km of the coast and about 40,000 living within 100m of it, sea-level rise is not something we can afford to ignore even if the clouds above us are grey and the temperature is cool.

Driving the sea-level rise is cumulative ice loss from the world’s glaciers and from the Greenland ice sheet which reached a record high in 2023. The last year to see a net gain of ice is still 1996. It is virtually impossible for these ice sheets to recover once they start melting, leading to what scientists call “cascading” effects where one tipping point such as the loss of the ice’s albedo triggers yet further warming. Other tipping points of concern include the dieback of biodiverse biomes such as the Amazon rainforest or warm-water corals, and carbon release from thawing permafrost.

[ Irish hospital admissions due to hot weather projected to rise ]

Economic upheaval, collapses in crop yields and unprecedented heat stress on land are virtually inevitable in our lifetimes, and most certainly in our children’s. Every single data set used to monitor the Earth’s critical life-support systems shows unrelentingly grim trends. Ultimately, as long as greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels, livestock agriculture and deforestation continue to be released into the atmosphere, climate breakdown becomes inevitable and more difficult to stabilise. In fact, concentrations of carbon-dioxide, methane and nitrous-oxide reached record levels in 2023, and despite all the fine words from political leaders climate politics is mostly dangerously unhinged from the physics of what is unfolding in real time.

There is little point trying to “balance” the existential threats posed by climate change and loss of nature with snippets of good news, however welcome they are. It is true that in 2023 wind and solar combined added more new energy to the global mix than any other source for the first time in history, according to Carbon Brief analysis. Nevertheless, record global demand for energy saw coal and oil use also reaching new highs last year.

As long as the world’s petrostates, fossil fuel companies and apologists for business-as-usual continue to hold our planet hostage we are on a path to unprecedented human suffering and devastating biodiversity loss. There are no bad summers on a dead planet.

Sadhbh O’Neill is a climate and environmental policy researcher