Many thanks to the good citizens of Thurles who gave so generously to the Cabragh Wetlands Church Gate Collection at the end of May. The total raised was beyond our expectations, and remarkable given the current economic climate when so many of us are having to tighten our financial drawstrings. We take it to mean that the local community supports and appreciates what we are trying to do at Cabragh, and that environmental issues are steadily becoming more important in public debate and education.
This is just as well, because climate change science has taken a bit of a battering in the press in recent months. We are indebted to Nenagh-based Father Sean McDonagh, a prolific writer on environmental issues, for a recent e-mail containing his latest thoughts on the issue. He points out that in the last year global temperature has been the warmest on record, despite the obvious contradiction that China, Europe and North America had a very cold winter in 2009-2010 (our coldest in 47 years). He cites NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen (mentor of Al Gore), who reports that data from 6,300 monitoring stations around the world show that the mean surface temperature was 0.65 degrees Celsius warmer in the year April 2009-April 2010 than the period 1951 to 1980.
Those childishly petulant private e-mails at the University of East Anglia damaged the climate change cause, as did overly pessimistic UN reports that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by the middle of this century. But the glaciers are still melting away; if they survive a century longer than predicted, say to 2165, the message is still the same. The planet is warming; the science is overwhelming. Predictions about the precise rate of change will always be predictions, and thus subject to doubt and imprecision. As a result of a well-organized campaign by climate change sceptics, a growing number of people think that global warming is not happening. Remember that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather is what hits us locally day after day, with wide ranging temperatures and varied rainfall. Climate is the long-term global trend, which is demonstrably and inexorably getting hotter.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association reports that the first four months of 2010 were the hottest ever recorded, with record temperatures in North Africa, Canada and South Asia. In India and Pakistan temperatures have reached 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit). On June 1st 2010 the mercury hit 53.7 Celsius in the Indus valley, the fourth highest ever recorded on Earth. In Baghdad there have been several days of over 50 degrees Celsius. People in northern India are dying from heat-related illnesses. Lake Tanganyika is at its hottest for 1500 years, threatening both fish stocks and the fishing industry on which many depend. You will not find many doubters about climate change in these parts of the world, nor in the Pacific Ocean, where they are watching rising levels remorselessly engulf their homes, and the evacuation of the Carteret Islands continues as the land is submerged.
Average ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean are at their highest since records began in 1880 and scientists predict a very active hurricane season with 8 to 14 expected, half “major storms”. We may yet see that Gulf oil landing on Irish coasts as it is washed into the Atlantic tidal streams. Raw oil pollution seems an apt punishment for a problem largely caused by our fossil fuel usage. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
As Monday 21st of June will be the longest day of the year, there will be a celebration of the Summer Solstice at Cabragh Wetlands at 8.00pm.
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