IRELAND IS CURRENTLY experiencing a bout of unseasonably warm weather for this time of year.
The warm temperatures this month follow one of the wettest Octobers on record and the hottest summer in over 135 years.
According to Met Éireann, Ireland experienced its warmest November night on record last Thursday, with a temperature of 15.5 degrees Celsius recorded at Shannon Airport.
Temperature records were also broken at five other synoptic stations on the day.
Head of forecasting at Met Éireann Evelyn Cusack told The Journal last week that the current mild spell was due to the air mass over Ireland coming up from the Tropics.
When asked how much climate change was factoring into the unusual weather, Cusack believed it was hard to say if this specific period of warmth was climate change-related.
However, weather patterns associated with climate change such as more severe and frequent rainfall over the past several years have increased, she said.
“What seems more obvious is the intense rainfall. We’re part of a trend of an exceptionally warm autumn in Europe and the warmer atmosphere is producing more moisture and more rain,” Cusack said.
Speaking to The Journal, Peter Thorne, climatologist and professor at Maynooth University, said that the warm spell of weather Ireland has experienced in recent weeks is “absolutely” linked to climate change.
“It’s been a very, very unusual spell of weather. It’s very unusual, even for the country the size of Ireland. I think we’ve had a run of something like 16 months of above average temperatures. That kind of a run of above average temperatures would be impossible in a climate that was not perturbed by humans at a kind of fundamental level,” Thorne said.
“Heat waves are simply a significantly warm departure from the seasonal average. We have heat waves even in the middle of winter, it’s just that people call them a nice mild spell of weather. But climate change has unequivocally made heat waves more frequent, more severe. That’s one of the very strongest pieces of evidence in climate change.”
Provisional new highest minimum temperature record for November in Ireland last night. Between 21:00UTC and 09:00UTC, the temperature at Shannon Airport, Co Clare didn't fall below 15.5°C. The previous record was 14.6°C. Five other synoptic stations also broke the previous record pic.twitter.com/RmrtOmd9eC
— Irish Observational Climatology (@METclimate) November 11, 2022
A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that the evidence that climate change is occurring globally at accelerated rates is unequivocal, and that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2,000 years.
The report states that with further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climate extremes, including more frequent heatwaves and droughts.
“We’re shifting fundamentally with all aspects of climate due to human influence, but the shift is larger in the extremes of temperature, in particular in the hot extremes of temperature and in the mean temperature,” Thorne said.
“That’s because just a small shift in the distribution of temperatures means that things that were very unlikely are now just unlikely and things that were extremely unlikely become very unlikely.”
He added that we are increasingly seeing heat extremes in other parts of the world with temperature departures that “certainly would have been impossible without human influence on the climate system”.
A World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report, published earlier this month, shows that temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average over the past 30 years, rising 1.5 degrees Celsius in just three decades.
The report states that regardless of future levels of global warming, temperatures will rise in all European areas at a rate exceeding global mean temperature changes.
‘Prolonged periods’ of warmth
Asked what this current warming might mean for the future, Thorne said that he would expect more and more of these types of events to occur throughout the year.
It was a very mild November day across the country today 📈
— Met Éireann (@MetEireann) November 10, 2022
See the maximum air temperatures recorded across our network of weather stations below 👀⬇️
Average maximum air temperatures for the month of November are usually around 9-11°C 🌡️
More here 👇https://t.co/WGWSoj46th pic.twitter.com/AqZ08GmcuM
“The departure from normal might actually be greater in autumn, winter and spring than in summer, but we’ll see more and more occurrences where for periods of days or weeks, we have prolonged periods of abnormally warm or hot weather for the time of year,” he said.
Everything we are seeing is a signature of the fact that the climate is changing, and what we see now is a foretaste of what we might see in the future. Summers like we had this summer, which are highly unusual now, might become once a decade events in a couple of decades hence and by the end of the century, if we don’t get a handle on things, they might be seen as unusually cool summers.
He added that the heavy rainfall will also be a problem in the future.
“I was just just this morning up near Athlone and you can see the Shannon already well and truly burst its banks and we are only in the middle of November.
“If we continue to have a run of these depressions coming in then undoubtedly later in the winter, the flooding of the Shannon will be a major, major news story, because we preconditioned it. The Shannon is already overtopping its banks. So it’s not just the mild weather, it’s also the very wet weather.”
As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, 193 countries and the EU agreed to the goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Thorne said that it is ”almost certain if not very certain” that we will reach 1.5 degrees of warming “probably in the next decade realistically”.
“The real question is will we pull back from the precipice? Will we enact very, very strong policies that mean that we overshoot 1.5 by a very little bit, and then eventually by, say the end of the century, draw back by 1.5? That’s one world we could live in, it’s a world that requires immediate attention today in a sustained manner that we don’t see yet, either nationally or internationally.
“The other option is that we continue to emit and we blast past 1.5 degrees and even past 2 degrees,” he said, adding that there is “a whole rash of studies” that suggest that we will “probably end up somewhere around 2.5 degrees by the end of the century, and still rising”.
What we will see at 1.5 and 2 is fundamentally what we see now but each time, we’ve put the athlete that is climate on an increased level of steroids.
“We will see more and more extremes of heat and of precipitation in particular, and more and more cases where either our human infrastructure and society, and or nature cannot cope with the changes that we will bring into the climate system.”
‘We need to act’
He said that our average temperature has already changed and will continue to change in the future.
“We should not be in a position in the middle of November where people are comfortably walking around in t-shirts. That’s not our normal climate, that’s not the climate that our infrastructure is built for. It’s not the climate that nature expects and we will see the impacts in terms of cascading impact on nature very, very quickly.”
As COP27 discussions continue this week, Thorne said that those in power need to take action.
“We need to recognise the severity of the challenge and recognise that we need to make very very difficult decisions and they require broad political consensus because they need to be carried through multiple successive governments,” he said.
We need to continue to look at the evolution of the Climate Action Plans. But having plans talking about climate change isn’t what we need to be doing. What we need to be doing is acting and that requires action across all sectors and all of society at a fundamental level.
“It means that everyone when they make a decision to purchase or not purchase something need to be making that decision with climate in mind. That’s kind of the level at which we now need to engage with this challenge.”
He said that had world leaders acted in the 1990s, “we’d have had a huge range of options open to us”, but despite nominally taking the issue seriously, we still have increased emissions “by more than half since 1990 on an annual basis globally”.
“We could have had a much easier time of it. The fact is we’ve continued to ignore and or prevaricate to the point where the only option if to want to hit 1.5 is really, really tough choices. And if we kick the can again the choices become harder and if we kick the can again, we can monitor again.
“At some point, we need to collectively sit up and decide what we actually need to do something about this. I fear that will be when we’ve passed 2 degrees.”
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