The Daily IIJ

By Kieran Cooke

Rain in Ireland in early August. Then, while teaching a course at InWent in Berlin in the middle of the month, more rain. The skies continued to pour down water in Ireland for the rest of the August and then, returning to England, it did little but rain for most of September. It ’s very easy to blame climate change but there is no solid proof it is the cause.

It has been a summer not to remember in much of northern Europe - in many areas the wettest on record. In the west of Ireland the total average amount of rain for two summer months fell in just one 24 hour period. There were serious floods in towns and cities up and down the country as rivers burst their banks.

Farmers in England are having their worst harvest in decades. One farmer in the east of the country says he recorded only three days without rain from the end of July to mid September. Wheat crops are rotting in the fields. Thousands of hectares of oil seed rape - much of it used for the production of biofuels - are uncut. Even if the crops dry out, the ground is too wet for combine harvesters and heavy machinery to get on to the land. The result is likely to be yet more rising prices.

So what has caused all this moisture in the atmosphere? It ’s very easy to blame climate change but there is no solid proof it is the cause. Both last summer and this the jet stream flows over the Atlantic have been unusual. These fast moving, high atmosphere winds have been much further south than usual, and have prevented hot weather from southern Europe being blown further north. Instead storm after storm has battered northerly regions.

In many areas it has been unseasonably cool: again climate change cannot be blamed, though the experts tell us that much of Europe is now going through a relatively mild spell. In a few years time hot summers - like the one in 2003 when thousands of people round Europe died of heat exhaustion and many species of plants were lost due to a drying out of the land - will become the norm rather than the exception.

There’s little doubt that heavy rain is becoming a more frequent occurrence: while those living in tropical regions might be used to monsoon type downpours, a lighter type of rain is more usual in Europe. Not any more say the experts: one thing that climate change is likely to bring is ever heavier downpours - and ever more flash floods.

People living in their picturesque houses near river banks have been warned: their homes will be hit by more floods in future. Already insurance companies are refusing cover to those in the more vulnerable areas.

Yet in the midst of all this rain, there is talk of water shortages. The problem is that either the rain falls in the wrong place - or that it falls too quickly and cannot be absorbed into underground storage systems or into reservoirs, or a combination of both. In Ireland - famous for the amount of rain it receives - there are predictions that within only a few years there will be severe water shortages. The east of the country will be particularly badly hit, say the experts.

The trouble is the majority of the Republic of Ireland’s 4 million people live in the east of the country, especially round Dublin, the capital. Planners say the solution is a water pipeline which will bring supplies from the more rainy western side of the country to the east: such a project involves enormous expenditure – just at a time when Ireland’s economy, for years one of the fastest growing in Europe, has plunged into recession.

Of course Ireland and Europe’s problems with water and weather are relatively minor compared with many parts of the world. Countries like Bangladesh, struggling to develop economically but faced with enormous climate change connected problems - in particular rising seawater levels - are in a much more difficult situation. But the dull, wet summer that has been experienced in much of Europe shows that no one can escape changes in weather patterns: we will all have to adapt in the years ahead.

Kieran Cooke was a lecturer at InWent in August, 2008