Persuasion not preaching needed on climate change
Country Living with Francis Farragher
For starters, I’m not including myself in that group of people who deny that climate change is happening at all, or that our world is warming up a bit too quickly for our own survival into the future, but there are times too when a line has to be drawn.
We now can have scarcely a typical wet and windy West of Ireland day, without climate change being mentioned as the cause of the breezes blowing in from the Atlantic, as they have done so, since the formation of our earth in its current guise.
Ireland is a little island country perched on the eastern fringe of the Atlantic Ocean, a volume of water and energy that pretty much guarantees in the course of any given year, we’ll get our fair share of wind and rain but too much by way of any extremes.
The Atlantic does have its good points too. Its relatively mild waters, influenced by the Gulf Stream, also ensure that our climate tends in the main to avoid the extremes of weather events that can cause so much devastation in other parts of the world.
What would parts of fire-ridden and grief sticken California give for our mix of wind, rain and some good days that tend to dominate our climate pattern. Extremes in climate are very bad news whether it be wind, temperatures, rainfall or severe cold. The biggest killer of all weather events worldwide is heatwaves. Not normally a problem for us here in Ireland, but after our Summer drought in 2018, we did get a rare little taste of that extreme of weather.
The problem now, is that if you make any point about our weather here in Ireland always having contained a bit of everything but not too much of anything, you’re regarded as some kind of pariah, unless you attribute every heavy shower to climate change.
The lecture brigade is now firing themselves into the debate as well. A few weeks ago, I nearly choked on a bit of sirloin, when I heard former President, Mary Robinson, essentially telling us all to go vegetarian, in order to save our little planet, although she did concede to being partial to the odd slice of Connemara lamb.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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