Although we often complain about it, the weather in Ireland isn’t too bad. It rarely gets too hot, too cold or too wet - but this could change. Over the last few million years, the Irish climate has changed a lot, from tropical to ice age to temperate, and it is changing again.

SCOPE asks Dr Rowan Fealy, a geography specialist at NUI Maynooth, what climate change means for all of us. Rowan investigates future weather scenarios and the impact that climate change might have on our environment.

Climate change

So, just what is climate change?  “Climate change is where humans are emitting greenhouse gases and, as a result, we’re warming up the atmosphere,” he says. “There’s a natural layer around the earth - the atmosphere - and this allows sunlight to penetrate through to the earth and keep it warm. However, with increasing emissions of greenhouse gases, this is trapping the radiation being emitted back out by the earth. As a result, we’re seeing an increase in global temperatures.”

Rowan says that we have committed ourselves to a certain degree of global warming already, so even if we were to freeze all transport right now, for example, we would still see increasing global temperatures.

Worst scenario

So what’s the worst case scenario if we don’t actually do anything? Rowan says that the most climate change the earth will probably experience is five to six degree increases in global temperatures by the end of the present century. This will have a big impact on human populations all around the world – for example, there will be an increase in sea level.

“We’re looking at an increase in sea level of about half a metre by the end of the century,” says Rowan. “While that doesn’t sound like an awful lot, if you have a high tide, and you add half a metre to the high tide, you have a storm surge event.”

A storm surge could be very serious as it would break down sea walls and cause flooding and damage. Geographers like Rowan are not only concerned for us, but for the next generation and the generations after that.

Future weather

Unless we all change the way we treat the environment, our climate is going to be completely different. So what’s going to happen exactly here in Ireland?

SCOPE decided to ask the weather man for the forecast up to the year 2060! Gerry Murphy is a meteorologist at Met Éireann, the Irish weather service. He spends most of his time analysing and predicting the weather and we often see him on RTÉ television, telling us about the weather.

But Met Éireann is also trying to predict the weather well into the future – from 2021 to 2060.

So what will the weather of the future be like?

“Is in terms of precipitation – rainfall - it does look like we can expect mild or much wetter winters with some fairly significant flooding in some places and then drier summers as well,” says Gerry. “We also get a number of very severe storms in Ireland each winter, and it looks as if the frequency of those storms will actually increase.”

Hurricane

Gerry shows Kathriona a computer simulation which has increased the temperature of the sea by one degree. As a result, there is a very intense hurricane-like depression developing over the Atlantic and then making its way towards Ireland.

“It certainly won’t be a hurricane by the time it gets to Ireland,” says Gerry. “It will be a fairly significant storm which will cross up over the country.”

At the moment, hurricanes form down in the subtropics and then head towards the Gulf of Mexico. With a warmer sea, these intense depressions could form a bit further north – so nearer us - and then track towards Ireland, though Gerry assures us that they wouldn’t be of hurricane strength by the time they reached us.

So there’s no need to panic about hurricanes just yet – while these are the trends expected, there are still a lot of uncertainties about what will happen. One thing’s for certain though – if we don’t change our behaviour towards the environment, our weather will change even more and it might have more lasting effects on our lives than a change in what we wear.

Learn more:

Visit the climate change section of ENFO’s website

Read more about the effects of global warming at science.ie

Get today’s weather forecast online at Met Éireann