People in Ireland face living in “a bloody cold, bloody wet” country if increasingly strong warnings that climate change could interrupt Atlantic Ocean current patterns come true, Minister for the Environment Eamon Ryan has warned.
Scientists increasingly raise fears that the so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which regulates the exchange of water between the world’s oceans, is threatened by rising global temperatures caused by climate change.
Temperatures in Europe will plummet if that happens, up to 15 degree for some northern European states, while Amazonian wet seasons will cease and sea levels threatening coastal cities would rise even faster than currently expected, by tens of centimetres.
Speaking to the Kennedy Summer School in Co Wexford, Mr Ryan said that the warnings about Atlantic Ocean currents are “the most terrifying for us” on the island of Ireland.
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“We could live in a very bloody cold, wet, windy country in a warmer world. We spent three weeks out west in that weather this summer. I don’t think any of us would want that always,” he said.
The deadline for the world’s nations to take action to slow down, not halt, the pace of climate change is tightening, he warned: “If we can’t avoid some of the tipping points [and] we go over a tipping point where it runs away from us, then we can’t hold it back.”
Mr Ryan, who is stepping down from national politics at the end of the life of this Dáil, said that climate action is threatened by “identity politics, where [the crisis] exists on one side but not on the other.
“You’ve got to be careful when you talk about climate. You can bore the pants off people, or you can come across as Holy Joe, or you can get technical in a way that you lose people. How we speak about this is really tricky,” he went on.
“Because in truth, to meet the deadlines, to deliver the scale of change, we need to win on climate the next five elections in a row. It can’t be stop-start. The scale of the change is so great that you can’t do it with 51 per cent of the people,” the Minister told the summer school.
He expressed disappointment that the threats posed by climate change did not feature at either of the big party conventions held in recent weeks in the US, with neither the Republicans nor the Democratic Party drawing attention to it.
“The word ‘climate’ was not mentioned one time. Was not on anyone’s radar. Hard to believe,” he said, though he noted the decision by Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, to speak twice about it in a CNN interview on Thursday.
The public cannot be “shamed” into living less-damaging lifestyles, he said: “The question is, can we do it quick enough? It will not be done if that’s just about personal responsibility and shaming people who are not doing that,” he went on.
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