Constructing The History Of Climate And Society In Ireland

In Ireland, as elsewhere on the planet, the proliferation in recent years of extreme weather events has amplified interest in the reconstruction of an accurate history of climate and weather. Yet, as John Sweeney explains in his contribution to this collection (chapter 13) in which he traces the appreciation in ‘societal awareness’ of climate change, appreciation of its implications emerged slowly. Indeed, though the nineteenth-century Irish born scientist John Tyndall was one of the first to identify the warming effects of greenhouses gases, ‘climate change was not deemed a serious issue in Ireland…at either the academic or public level for a number of years’ after the establishment (at the instigation of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)) in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This was not a tenable position, given the weight of scientific evidence pointing to the acceleration in ‘global warming’, but the Irish scholarly community was poorly positioned to identify the likely implications as climate modelling was still in its infancy and the research infrastructure required to investigate the phenomenon was basic at best. Moreover, the meteorologists, climate geographers and others who were in the vanguard of inquiry in this respect could not appeal to the history of climate in Ireland either for context or direction since the discipline of History seemed disinterested, while Geography did not prioritise historical climate inquiry. By comparison, archaeologists and scholars in cognate disciplines afforded it more prominence in their narratives, though their hypotheses were rarely demonstrable evidentially.