A threatening climate - We can’t say we weren’t warned

Those prescient advocates who 30 or even 20 years ago warned about how climate change would alter our lives profoundly could not be derided today as they were then. The evidence has become irrefutable, all too regular. Our belated response is reactive rather than proactive and the evidence has also assumed an air of threat that we ignore at our peril.

Those pioneers were shamefully derided as “tree huggers” by B movie cowpoke-turned American president Ronald Reagan. Another of his dismissals: “Once you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all” pointed to an ignorant insensitivity that would not be tolerated today. That, tragically, does not mean that the issues driving accelerating climate change are given the priority they demand in Ireland, the western world, the Brick economies, or the developing world.

Recent days and weeks have seen the country battered by storms, persistent and heavy rains, snow in some instances, devastating winds — yesterday’s 96km/h windspeeds at Cork Airport hardly seem remarkable any more — and repeated flooding in areas vulnerable to tidal surges. The impact is no longer the issue, it is their regularity and the rate at which they are becoming the norm that causes great concern.

We are not alone. Severe weather warnings remain in place in Britain. The extremes are, naturally, even more extreme in America’s mid-west. Facing the lowest temperatures recorded in over two decades, Chicago and Indianapolis were hit with overnight lows of -24ºC, Minneapolis -34ºC and Fargo, North Dakota, -31ºC. The life-threatening cold was heading eastwards and ironically will provoke an even greater use of carbon fuels and intensify the climate change vicious circle.

The Earth’s climate has constantly changed — in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat. The last ice age ended abruptly about 7,000 years ago. This marked the beginning of the modern climate era and human civilisation. In other words, we and our world exist only because the Earth’s climate morphed into something we — homo sapiens — find tolerable.

Nearly every effort humanity has made to control our influence on climate has failed. We regularly fall short on emissions targets and we seem unable to agree measures that will not have an inordinate impact on societies less developed that the world’s richest countries. In an unequally divided world this cannot be a surprise but it has meant that we have wasted many decades, maybe more, in the fight to re-stabilise the climate all life depends on. Now we not only have to fight reluctant forces to reduce humanity’s impact on climate but we also have to divert resources to cope with the initial period of climate change. The scale of that challenge is almost beyond comprehension but it must, if life and society as we know them are to continue, be met.

One simple and very small example of what lies ahead might be the prospect of building tidal barriers across the Lee at, say, Lough Mahon or face the prospect of effectively abandoning swathes of central Cork City centre. Even if we had the — ballpark figure — €1bn needed to build it the Ronald Reagans of today would prevaricate and scoff and waste another few decades.

Does anyone really think we have that kind of time left?