The autumn equinox has passed, having brought us its usual gifts of rain-belts, gales and rough seas. The swallows and other migrant birds have flown south, the horse chestnuts are dropping, leaves are turning brown, golden and red, the evenings are darkening and the televised soccer season is in full swing. All around us are reminders that autumn is here and winter is close behind; and even if one is not prey to the "winter blues" - now a respectable, physiologically based illness known as Seasonal Affective Disorder - it is natural to feel sad at the prospect. We have had, by Irish standards, a middling-to-good summer, and as the clouds scowled, the winds gusted and the rain poured down last weekend and earlier this week, it was hard not to gaze into the grey murk and reflect wryly that there will be many more days like this. Yet the very unpredictability that makes our weather often so maddening - especially when a holiday is marred, a picnic abandoned or a golf outing washed out - can also be a source of hope and consolation. For if we have chilly days in June that rightly belong to March, we can also have Indian summers in October or unseasonably balmy breaks in winter when, as Micheal Mac Liammoir wrote, "you may breakfast in your garden on sudden golden mornings of February or November". It is also worth remembering - especially in a year that has seen so many natural disasters around the world - that although our weather is often dull and sometimes miserable, it is rarely dangerous. Yes, lives are lost in storms at sea, waves have swept people to their deaths, trees felled by high winds are a lethal hazards on the roads. But catastrophic, large-scale loss of life because of hurricane, tornado, avalanche, flash-flood, mudslide or tidal wave is thankfully unknown to us. We are fortunate even in comparison with our near neighbours: there is no meteorologically caused disaster in Irish history to compare with the North Sea tidal surge of 1953, which claimed some 300 lives in East Anglia (and over 2,000 in the Netherlands).
Seasonal reflections such as these seem timeless - yet they may not be. For the steady stream of predictions about the possible effects of "global warming" suggest that - unthinkable though it would have seemed until recent times - our weather may not always be with us. As Dr Mick Kelly of the University of East Anglia said on a BBC TV documentary this week, "a small change in climate can have tremendous effects on our experience of weather at local level." Certainly, the late 1980s and early 1990s have seen an increase in the frequency of storms, though this may be attributable to other factors. And while climate change defies accurate prediction, scientific forecasts are, on balance, rather alarming. A British government report, for example, foresees a rise in average temperatures of up to 3.5 C in the next century; the consequences of such a change would include a rise in sea-level of up to four inches per decade, causing vast coastal flooding. As noted in these columns last week, the head of the UN Environment Programme, Dr Klaus Topfer, has said that the Kyoto Protocol, in which leading industrialised countries agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is failing, and that it may already be too late to arrest global warming. We might be well advised to enjoy our Irish weather while it lasts.