Wet summer may not be caused by climate change

DESPITE the wettest summer in half a century a senior Met Éireann forecaster has claimed it is too early to blame the unseasonable weather on climate change.

Ray McGrath, Met Éireann’s head of research, said that, while July and August of the last two years were swamped with torrential downpours, it was nothing too out of the ordinary.

Speaking at a three-day conference on climate change at Trinity College, Mr McGrath revealed that figures from the meteorological service revealed parts of the country showed rainfall levels 200% above normal, with Dublin recording the heaviest levels in 171 years.

However, the forecaster was anxious to point out that, over the last century, Irish summers were a mixed bag with the country basking in glorious sunshine some years and grim and dull weather on others.

“The attitude prevalent today is to blame everything on climate change. If you have a bad summer, it must be due to climate change, or if you get flooding it must be to do with climate change. Okay, the flooding events that we’ve seen this summer are consistent with what you would expect with climate change, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is to do with climate change,” he said.

“It has been a very bad summer and the flooding has been very bad as well.

“If you look at it in the context of the weather we’ve had over the last 50 years there have been other episodes when we’ve had some very heavy flooding.”

Mr McGrath went on: “In the next 10 years if we had 10 bad summers in a row you’d begin to feel there is something fundamental here and climate change has perhaps changed our climate in some sort of fundamental way, that our summers are wetter,” Mr McGrath said.

“But it’s too early to go down that route.”

The 6th Scientific Statement of the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Committee on Climate Change was also launched at the conference.

It says that climate change will lead to the loss of up to 40% of the climatic areas for Irish peatlands by 2075.

It also highlights recent studies showing the life cycle of birds and plants in Ireland, with birds migrating earlier and a number of species observed breeding here for the first time.