Locally and globally, this may be the year when the wishful thinking that global heating remains somehow in the future has been finally erased from our general mindset.
In Ireland, this summer was the warmest on record, according to Met Éireann. Widespread wildfires and drought were the outcomes. Across Europe, Asia and North America, wildfires raged on an unprecedented scale, while the catastrophic recent flooding in Nepal and Tibet is also credibly attributable to climate change.
Meanwhile, two high-level international reports in recent days offer convincing predictions that worse is to come, even if we were to change our behaviours radically today. Forces and feedback loops are now unleashed that have a momentum of their own.
A United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) report concedes, for the first time, that we cannot now remain within the limit of 1.5 degrees heating set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. And the World Meteorological Organisation has warned that this year’s El Niño, the periodic weather phenomenon generated by heat build-up in the Pacific, will be “supersized”, both exacerbated by global heating, and simultaneously gravely worsening its impacts across the globe.
This will drive up temperatures, disrupt rainfall, and trigger more extreme weather events well into 2027. The likely outcome here is a much wetter autumn, with increased flood risks.
The fact that the UNEP now accepts that the 1.5 degree heating limit will be inevitably exceeded changes the targets aspired to by the programme. The best we can hope for, the report says, is to limit the rise to 1.8 degrees, and then bring it down again fast, but this will be extremely challenging. New policies and technologies will be required.
“None of our plans are prepared for that,” one of the report’s authors, Debra Roberts, conceded. In the meantime, the impacts of a world heated by more than 1.5 degrees will be dramatic and, the report warns, in some cases irreversible.
“Severe damage to human health, food security, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies is expected,” it states. Sea level rise will endanger the very survival of low lying islands and coastal cities, including Irish ones.
The director of the Icarus Climate Research Institute at Maynooth University, Peter Thorne, summed up the prospects on RTE’s Morning Ireland: “It’s going to get rapidly worse from here on in”. Timmy Dooley, the Minister of State for the Environment, responded that “this Government is fully committed to climate action”. We need to see the evidence for this commitment, which is currently lacking, despite the efforts of many individual citizens to mitigate their climate impacts.