Heat is on for action over climate change
World of Politics with Harry McGee
The hottest day I remember in my life was when we went on holiday to Crete over 20 years ago. The temperature was in the forties and you could hardly move in the heat.
My stand-out memory is of my wife Fiona buying an ice cream cone for me in a town called Chania. It melted all over her hands during the 30 or so steps it took to get to me.
This week, Ireland recorded its hottest day in the 20th or 21st century when the Phoenix Park in Dublin hit 33 degrees Celsius. It’s not the highest on record though; that dates all the way back to 1887 – 33.3 Celsius at Kilkenny Castle.
Every time we have an extreme weather event, someone is inevitably going to pop up and say: “That’s global warming.”
It is and it isn’t. It isn’t because the temperature in Kilkenny Castle during the 19th Century reminds us that we have always go extremes of hot and cold, of rain, of wind, of storms.
However, it is the patterns and the more frequent recurrence of such events that illustrate that climate change is happening and the planet is heating. It’s one degree warmer now than it was in preindustrial times. If the mercury continues to rise, the planet is going to be in deep trouble.
As Met Éireann’s head of forecasting Evelyn Cusack said this week: "Unfortunately, climate change is here. When we get the air masses coming up from Europe, we too will experience some extreme weather and extreme weather events.”
This particular heatwave for us is the tail of the comet. The comet itself is Europe which has been in full heatwave mode for a few weeks, as has much of the Northern hemisphere.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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