Professor Peter Thorne told The Journal that the current spell of unusually warm weather is 'absolutely' linked to climate change.
The lighthouse at Roches Point, Co Cork. Image: Alamy Stock Photo IRELAND IS CURRENTLY experiencing a bout of unseasonably warm weather for this time of year.
However, weather patterns associated with climate change such as more severe and frequent rainfall over the past several years have increased, she 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.”
“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.” 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.
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”. “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.