Amid all the talk of weather warnings, wildfires and parched earth across Europe, there was a gentle drizzle falling on the Céide Fields in north Mayo on a recent visit and the temperature was a cool 16 degrees. Hardly a scene to ponder global warming, you might think, but that would be the wrong way to look at it. The story of the Céide Fields is of considerable relevance to the current climate change crisis.
The extensive remains of this Neolithic farmed landscape prompted a reflection from the late Manchán Magan a decade ago: “The very fact that beneath the wild heathery bogs of north Mayo lies this extensive monument is both humbling and hard to grasp. The idea that we can walk in the steps of our ancestors from 5,000 years ago, following along old barley ridges where they would once have cast their seeds and knelt to weed their precious crops is a cause of wonder.”
It is indeed, but the casting of seeds and tending to valued crops also ended. While there is some divergence in assessments of archaeologists about the precise dating of the settlement and what prompted the demise of its soil and the abandonment of the land, the intensity of farming, land usages and climate change have all been considered as factors.
Met Éireann maintains a database of climate measurements that contains record values of air temperature from only 1880 onwards. During recent hot spells there has been a preoccupation with the heat at Kilkenny Castle in June 1887 when Ireland’s highest air temperature was recorded with a reading of 33.3 degrees. There has been much anticipation about the possibility of that being exceeded. That summer in 1887, The Irish Times referred to the “Extraordinary Heat”; there were reports of mountain fires, withered crops and even three soldiers dying from heat stroke.
READ MORE
Such distress resonates today, but our perspective needs to be much wider; we can get fixated on particular temperatures or weather events, such as the Big Wind in January 1839 that killed more than 300 people in Ireland, rather than looking at wider spans.
A volume of essays published by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 2021, Climate and Society in Ireland from Prehistory to the Present, looked, among other things, at “the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks and changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820”.
The modern study of Ireland’s climate, it was suggested, could be dated to the 17th century with the publication of Gerard Boate’s A Natural History of Ireland in 1652, while the 19th century Irish-born scientist John Tyndall was one of the first to identify the warming effects of greenhouses gases.
It might seem far-fetched to be concerned with how climate change affected small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago, but the reality, as pointed out by UCD archaeologist Graeme Warren, is that “contemporary hunting and gathering communities are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change”.
Environmental historians have also highlighted that Irish springs and summers in the 16th century were particularly wet and winters harsh, and have pointed to references in the Gaelic Irish annals during that era to woodland destruction, animal mortality, the ruining of corn and coastal erosion.
Climate migration is also a long-standing phenomenon and will only be exacerbated by the contemporary overheating as more areas become uninhabitable. A UN publication in 1985, Environmental Refugees, is regarded as the beginning of attempts to address this theme in the modern era; it defined such refugees as “those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of marked environmental disruption ... that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life”.
In 1990, the first UN intergovernmental report on climate change stated that “the gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration as millions will be displaced” due to droughts, floods and rising sea levels. Three years later, British environmental scientist Norman Myers predicted that there could be up to 150 million environmental refugees by the end of the 21st century.
This summer has dramatically reminded us these are not abstract scenarios, but it is also necessary to look back at historic adaptation and climate change strategies. As the 2021 RIA volume argued, “As the challenge of climate change compels us to alter our behaviour in the present, it is essential that we equip ourselves with a full and detailed appreciation of how our forbears did so in the past. This will not provide us with all the answers we may need in the years ahead but should assist us in understanding the order and range of the problems that will be posed.”
