Before the flood - We must act on warnings on sea levels

EVEN the most resilient and optimistic among us must be approaching misery overload. If the economy and soaring unemployment figures don’t push you towards the edge then there’s always the predictions about the awful impact climate change will have on our world, especially our children’s world.

At this point the phrase “climate change conference” has become shorthand for a gloomfest predicting almost unsurmountable challenges that can be as frightening as they are frustrating. This week’s climate change conference in Copenhagen is a classic of its kind but, unless we continue to be willfully negligent, we can’t keep pretending the warnings have nothing to do with us.

In Copenhagen on Tuesday scientists warned that the impact of global warming was accelerating beyond forecasts made two years ago. Just like the economy it seems the “naysayers” are right and the official line is well off the pace, deliberately or otherwise.

In Copenhagen scientists warned that sea levels will rise by multiples of 2007 predictions. Two years ago the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that global warming would lead to a devastating amalgam of floods, drought, disease and extreme weather by the century’s end. They thought oceans would rise by 18 to 59 centimetres, enough to wreak havoc for tens of millions of people living in low-lying deltas in eastern Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. But a new, reality-check study, presented in Copenhagen on Tuesday, said today’s best estimate, at about one metre, is much worse. Some researchers say it may rise by a greater margin. This will have disastrous consequences for millions, and as is usual, the poor will bear the brunt of the catastrophe.

UCC Professor of Physical Geography and IPCC member Robert Devoy has put this startling prediction in context for Ireland. He has warned that we must review our plans for docklands development. This admonishment should resonate loudly on an island where virtually every major city — Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Derry and Belfast — is built on an estuary and already has the irrepressible sea lapping at its doorstep. Prof Devoy warns we will have to build hugely expensive flood barrages to protect major centres of population and business.

Of course the situation is exacerbated by the fact we have drained virtually every bog in the country, turned our mountains into conifer-clad draining boards and inappropriately built on the flood plains surrounding nearly every town and city.

It is tempting to turn away hoping this problem will just go away, but we are well beyond that point. It is worrying too that our response is limited by our economic crisis. Imagine the reception Environment Minister John Gormley would get if he went to cabinet and asked for billions — for that is what it would cost — to try to make our coastal cities flood-proof. Exactly.

The time scales involved might allow some barrages to be built but it is impossible to imagine that every estuary will get one. Is it too much to hope that, before the tide is splashing around our ankles, that we might have an objective and realistic reappraisal of our costal cities and towns development plans?

Surely our economic collapse has taught us the consequences of ignoring well-founded warnings.