The Year in Review: The New Pollution

Maybe this was the year that the penny finally dropped. Extremes were everywhere. Northern Europe had the darkest winter on record, especially Moscow. Dublin airport had its wettest day in 70 years on January 24th (a lot of rain fell in January!!) Meanwhile, Cape Town effectively ran out of water. Storm Emma and the so-called 'beast from the east' brought severe cold weather here in February and March. We even had looting in Jobstown: nine men were charged. All of that was turned on its head by summer, when we had a state of absolute drought and seemingly never-ending sunshine. Which we enjoyed! It was back to basics in September with Storm Ali, during which an unfortunate Swiss woman died when her caravan was swept off a cliff in Galway.

The thing is, we can now see beyond the weather to the imprint of climate change. A review by the Department of Geography in NUI Maynooth of weather records over the last three centuries shows that the most recent decade is the wettest in over three hundred years. The winter of 2013/4 was the stormiest on record. Another study found that the Gulf Stream is at its weakest for 1,600 years, as predicted by global climate change models. We are in deep shit.

It was also a year of extraordinary worldwide wildfires that left hundreds dead and caused enormous damage to property, landscapes and ecosystems. They broke out in Greece, Portugal, France, Spain and Russia and there were repeated catastrophic forest infernos in California. Those winds are driven by the Jetstream, which was also what gave us our long hot summer. Some scientists now fear that such fires may at some point create a feedback vortex that will be beyond control. The earth itself might be incinerated.

There were huge floods too, with over a million people fleeing to camps to escape the flood waters In Kerala in India. A clue as to what is happening came with the news that the Arcticıs strongest sea ice has broken up for the first time on record, and there are huge fears for Greenlandıs ice sheet and what might happen if it melts before the Antarctic ice. They call it a post-glacial rebound. If the Antarctic sheet goes first, the east coast of the US will be completely inundated with water.

This is global climate change, not weather, and it matters to everyone. Well, except deniers, including Trump and Brazilıs new strongman Bolsonaro. He has no truck with any of this stuff and wants to open the rainforest to development. Growing coconut oil and avocadoes for people in western countries, many of whom cycle to work, eat organic food and profess concern about climate change.

Yeah, that includes you and me and a lot more besides. We can't change the big things but we can at least try to do the small things. Lowering demand for coconut oil, avocadoes and Brazilian beef might help to stay the destruction of the earth's great carbon recycling system. So let's start there.