How do you sell global warming to the Irish after the washout summer of 2024? It’s a tough job, but someone has got to do it. Not even the Irish Times are in crappy-weather denial, Justine McCarthy commenting, “What a truly lousy summer it has been.
To even call it summer is a corruption of the English language. It’s been chilly, windy and rainy but worst of all has been the absence of summer-wattage sunlight. The country has huddled under a roof of dirty-grey skies and sobbing clouds. Colour stripped from the season of buckets and spades. Shop rails of T-shirts and shorts in soul-nourishing oranges and lemons never made it beyond the door. If Ireland has 40 shades of green, it has 50 shades of grey.”
She goes on to say, “These patterns of wetter summers and warmer winters are exactly what climate experts have been predicting for Ireland.” Wetter and warmer, you say. Well, it certainly has been wetter, but no one can now say that it has been warmer.
Of course RTE gave it a good go as recently as July, warning us that a study from Maynooth University ‘found Ireland is now 20 times more likely than 80 years ago to experience its highest ever recorded temperature of 33.3C’.
Further climate terror followed when, another report, this time from the Economic and Social Research Institute told us the startling news that ‘There is evidence that higher temperatures significantly increase hospitalisation rates . . . T’
I voiced my rage and climate scepticism about these predictions of Climate Armageddon here.
Anyway, following the truly dreadful Irish summer someone, somewhere realised that this whole, we are all going to die of excessive heat messaging needed an upgrade. Step in true believer, Minister Eamon Ryan, Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport.
Now, it’s cancel the heatwave, cancel the trip to the beach, don’t worry about admissions to A and E increasing as the temperatures rise. Instead, we are going to freeze to death. Minister Ryan: “A study published by the renowned Potsdam Institute in Germany this summer raises serious concerns for Ireland. It confirms that we could be on course to cross a key climate tipping point in our oceans far earlier than most had previously expected. The data suggests that the Atlantic Meridional Circulating System (Amoc) may switch off. If that were to happen it would bring about a dramatic drop in temperatures here, even as the rest of the world continues to burn.” (My emphasis.)
So, there we are. Just in time to explain the wet, windy and cold summer the good people at the Potsdam Institute have now modelled a scenario where the gulf stream goes wonky and we all freeze to death – think Jack Nicholson up to his neck in a snow drift in the maze at the end of The Shining. The Minister has a similarly terrifying future in store for us all “rather than thinking how we manage climate refugees from the south, we might want to move south ourselves, out of the freezing cold.”
No, no, no. I was told as recently as July when RTÉ desperately tried to explain away our terrible summer that, “While the global average temperature steadily rises, your partial experience of it – wherever you are in the world – may be unremarkable or terrifying. Once the world’s weather stations have weighed in, summer 2024 will probably be declared the hottest on record. It is also certain to be among the coldest of the rest of your life.”
Coldest for the rest of my life, that was what I was promised. Instead, Minister Ryan comes along and tells me to pack my bags and head to Barcelona because it will in fact get much, much colder. Well, this is all very convenient if you ask me. I wonder if the Minister knows that the internet exists and people like me who are absolutely obsessed with the weather exist because I remember only too well that all the predictions for Ireland were, like the rest of the world, that it was going to get hot, hot, hot. And it’s not gotten hot, hot, hot has it, Minister? Now you tell us to accept all this modelling on climate change at face value and so sorry we may have gotten it wrong and instead it’s going to get arctic.
Listen I’m not a climate scientist, I understand things can move around on the whole computer modelling situation, but my point is, do they really know what they are doing? Because I don’t appreciate the flip-flop on the flip-flops. I thought I’d be sauntering around my kitchen in flip-flops, now I’m told to get the Uggs out. This is unacceptable.
A final point, if the Minister believes we are all going to freeze, does that mean he will continue to punish the Irish people with a carbon tax? That is quite reckless if you ask me, a direct health threat to older people who need to heat their homes to stay alive? Or will this punishment tax continue even when the forever winter arrives?