Lets face it, every time that we get a slightly odd weather phenomenon, the talk is about Global Warming and how this has caused our world to change upside down. Climate change is doing it all. Bad, bad climate change. When did climate change become bad? And since when was ALL climate change caused by us chuffing a load of carbon into the air. Now I am not quite in with George W on this one - whenever you have bad asthma like I have, you think that it is a pretty good thing if people reduce the amount of chemicals that they pump into the air . . . . . but - how far does this go to change climate.
The climate of NI has always been changing. People alive today can remember worse winters than what we get now (like 1969 or 1947) , they can remember summers where it rained every day, they can remember floods that took weeks for the water to reduce, they can remember droughts that descimated fields, they can remember years where the snow lasted from Dec until June and the river lagan and parts of Belfast lough were frozen over for months (1952). All global wamring? Or could it have been the cyclical pattern of climate - sometimes it is getting warmer and sometimes it is getting colder.
Even in NI there is huge amounts of evidence of climate change in past times. 8,000 years ago when Ireland was still attached via a landbridge to England and the rest fo Europe - the climate was different. the Ice age was probably also a bit on the cold side. Yet, before that tropical rainforests (with temps above 40 degrees and MORE rainfall than we get now) led to the production of peat and coal deposits. AND, it gets more complicated when you try to explain the huge limestone deposits without explaining soem form of climate change. The climate has been changing in NI for a long time and it will continue to change for a long time. The big question is . . . . . . . do we help speed up climate change and make it more unpredictable?
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