Education for Sustainable Development

The downpours experienced in our capital city last Monday were extreme by anyone's standard. According to Met Éireann Dublin experienced Octobers average monthly rainfall (65 mm) in just one-day (82 mm) .

Surely now it's time to start asking the hard question. Are these extreme weather events linked to climate change?

Up until recently the word with regard to extreme weather has been that you could never blame one individual event on climate change. However this position has been changing of late as more sophisticated computer climate models predict that short duration, extreme events will become more frequent and that we will have wetter winters and drier summers in Ireland. In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their fourth assessment on climate change said that it is "very likely that hot extremes, heatwaves and heavy rainfall will become more frequent"

But now there is also hard data supporting these climate models. In 2010 the EPA published their report Extreme Weather, Climate and Natural Disasters in Ireland, 2010. The report highlighted the empirical data that showed there has been approximately a 10% increase in annual rainfall over parts of Ireland since the 1970s and that there has also  been an increase in extreme rainfall events.

In February this year, Nature magazine published an article titled "Increased Flood Risk Linked to Global Warming". The article referenced two papers published by the magazine that month directly linking rising greenhouse gas levels with a growing intensity of rain and snow in the northern hemisphere and a doubling of flood risk in the United Kingdom.

The significance of linking these extreme weather events with climate change should be important for all of us. Yet this linkage receives little attention by media and policy-makers.

We only need to cast our memories back two years to November 2009, when Ireland experienced one of its worst flooding events on record. And again in July 2008, severe flooding was experienced in the Newcastle West area of Co Limerick and in August of the same year, several areas in the east of the country experienced significant flooding. All of this happened on top of three very wet consecutive summers from 2007 to 2009.

The worrying implications of these more frequent, more extreme weather events is that, what we have considered to be a once in one hunderd year event up to now, may in fact be starting to happen more often. If this is the case, and science would suggest it is, then Mondays weather should be a warning to us all.