It is too early to blame the unseasonable weather on climate change despite the wettest summer in half a century, a senior Met Éireann forecaster said today.
Speaking at a three-day conference on climate change at Trinity College Dublin attended by a range of international experts, Ray McGrath, Met Éireann’s head of research, said that although July and August of the last two years were swamped with torrential downpours it was nothing too out of the ordinary.
Figures from the meteorological service revealed parts of the country experienced rainfall levels 200 per cent above normal, with Dublin recording the heaviest levels in 171 years.
But Mr McGrath said if you look back 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.
Mr McGrath said: “This attitude that is prevalent today 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 do to with climate change.
“Okay the flooding events that we’ve seen this summer are consistent to what you would expect with climate change, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is to do with climate change.
“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.
“In the next ten years if we had ten 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 unveiled at the conference. It states that climate change will lead to the loss of up to 40 per cent 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.
PA