LAST UPDATE | 8 Jul

FLYING ACROSS IRELAND on an overnight flight from New York to Dublin almost exactly eight years ago in early July 2018, my face was pressed against the window looking at the countryside below. I’d never before seen the likes of it.

From west to east, the usual verdant patchwork quilt of greens was entirely gone, replaced by a uniform blanket of dusty browns and faded yellows – fields, meadows, forests and vegetation were parched and shrivelled, undernourished by shrunken waterways and a serious dearth of rainfall.

It was a bit discombobulating to witness from aboveground, almost as if the plane’s pilot had nodded off at the wheel, and we had strayed over central Spain.

2018 was a scorcher and was duly marked down as one of the warmest and driest summers on record for Ireland and most of Northwestern Europe. Sure, there were drought conditions and hair-raising wildfires and all that – but it was mighty, and all-too-rare, matched only by the heat of the fabled summer of 1976.

It was a proper Continental summer, as opposed to our usual mixed meteorological bag which ensures that making al fresco plans is a mug’s game. And so we made the most of it. God knows when the likes of such weather would come our way again.

And yet here we are in Ireland a mere eight years later, facing into our second heatwave in quick succession. Last month we learned what an Omega heat dome is (not good), and this week a prolonged spell of high temperatures has landed, along with heat advisories and sticky nights.

Planet of extremes

These days the weather is rarely out of the headlines. And it’s usually bad news, reporting on heat-related deaths in Europe – more than 200,000 people died from heat in Europe in the last four years, according to World Health Organization estimates. This week, tourists, including Irish holidaymakers, were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs as wildfires are ravaging parts of mainland Europe.

Such was the intensity of the heat in France that several nuclear plants shut down or reduced output last month due to a rise in the temperatures of the river water used to cool them.

Meanwhile, French media reported scuffles in stores over air conditioners and fans, which flew off the shelves faster than toilet rolls in 2020.

Over in the US, extreme heat disrupted 4th of July celebrations; the so-called Great American State Fair in Washington DC (which was more akin to Craggy Island’s Funland), marking the country’s 250th birthday, was temporarily shut after multiple people were treated for heat-related illnesses.

And it’s still not quite high season yet.

Only the sort of brain-dead swivel-eyed gobdaw who believes that the Earth is flat, that vaccines kill you stone-dead, that contrails are lethal Deep State chemtrails and that Donald Trump works tirelessly on behalf of America’s poor – would deny that human-driven climate change is an existential danger.

But alongside the mountains of alarming empirical data about a warming planet, there also is something less definable under threat.

Here in Ireland we’re more used to summers of discontent – watching with envy as friends and families disport themselves on Mediterranean beaches while we huddle behind wind-breaks in our togs. But, for more of us, this traditional discontent is morphing into a growing disquiet.

Media feeds are filled with scarifying fire-red maps and graphs and stats; the world’s oceans are the hottest on record for June and the El Niño currently brewing in the tropical Pacific will further supercharge temperatures in many parts of the globe.

But in this part of the globe at least, ‘Summer’ is a word synonymous with good vibrations. There was never a Winter of Love. School’s not out for Winter. Bruce Springsteen would never have written a song about Girls in their Winter Clothes, and if they’d grown up in Fargo, North Dakota, Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson would likely have been corn farmers, not beach boys.

Hoping for a decent summer is an integral part of Irish society. We endure chilly damp winters with predictions based on optimism over data that we’re overdue a fine summer. Before Yellow, Orange and Red warnings muscled in to spoil our forecasting fun, an Irish summer had its own peculiar categories: sure it’s grand (17 to 19C), it’s a bit warm (20 to 23C), it’s fierce hot (24-26C), I’m feckin’ dying here you could fry an egg (27-30C).

Once, any tentative thumbs-up from Met Éireann that a few nice days were upon us, and everyone threw sickies, threw on shorts and threw themselves down on the nearest patch of sand or grass. We then slathered in suntan oil – OIL! – and sizzled happily like a national panful of streaky rashers.

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A new reality

Knowing what we know now about the dangers of UV rays, it’s hard to understate just how our mindsets have changed along with the climate. Sunburn was once worn like a badge of honour. At night, we lay in bed with our pyjamas stuck to us, roaring-hot skin slathered in soothing Calamine lotion, unwavering in our belief that the Irish sun was a different class of sun than the one beating down on the Costa del Sol, so no harm done, we’ll be brown in the morning.

For denizens of this damp island, a string of sunny days in Ireland has always been a genuine joy: the pleasure of heading outdoors for a picnic, barbecue, open-air concert or sports event, going for a run, going for a pint, without a jacket or jumper in tow.

We still revel in summer sunlight, we luxuriate in it (albeit more sensibly). It’s almost as if – akin to hibernating animals in winter – we want to hoard the warming beams and golden light, and live off them during the months when grey skies enshroud the country for weeks on end.

But increasingly a soupçon of disquiet accompanies the season – a cloud of anxiety floating among those endless blue skies. We now know that we can have too much of a good thing, and let’s face it – the Beige Isle really doesn’t have a ring to it.

There’s little point in sticking our collective heads in the sand (the sand’s too hot to do so anyway, and our arses would fry) about the world’s longer, hotter summers and wilder, wetter winters.

Maybe this is the scorching summer which spurs coordinated and committed global action.

Or else this is simply the new normal for a planetful of boiling frogs.

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer, and a columnist for The Journal.