Time to review flooding plans - IPCC report moves goalposts

John Maynard Keynes’ famous question, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”, took on a sharp relevance for Cork City Council this week. Chief executive Ann Doherty insisted that a controversial Lee flood defence scheme need not be revised because of an EU ruling on a technicality in the planning application process.

That she made her remarks on the day the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world faces climate catastrophe change far earlier and on a totally unexpected scale than anticipated, suggests she, like many others in authority, is planning for a world that has gone rather than the one predicted.