Proposals for offshore wind farms; A new sense of urgency is essential

On Monday, RTÉ gave a powerful example of a core obligation of public service broadcasting — tell the truth, even if the sky should fall in. Weather expert Gerard Fleming presented Will Ireland Survive 2050? It was sobering and almost too challenging. It showed how rising seas will change our country well before the children who started school this autumn start a family. “The sea will come and take them back,” he warned about cities built on estuaries — as all ours are.

Climate sceptics may scoff, but if they look at Delhi, where 25m people are being smoked like a side of salmon for Christmas, or Sydney’s 5m residents facing an “unprecedented, catastrophic fire warning” just days after California endured wildfires of record intensity, they might accept today’s science. If those hells do not convince, then deniers might consider this summer’s fires in Siberia, where 17m acres were turned to cinders. The inferno was so intense that Alexander Uss, governor of Krasnoyarsk, said it was “pointless, and maybe even harmful” to fight the fires. Russia declared a state of emergency in the Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk regions, an area larger than India. Irish orinitholigists may have identified a consequence of those fires. Birds like woodcock, which breed in Siberia but winter in Ireland, have returned to our shores, but juvenile birds are, so far, largely absent, giving rise to concerns that a proportion of this year’s young birds were lost in the inferno. A woodcock in the mine, as it were.