"Green" policies are destroying this country

An opinion puff piece hosted by Wordpress.

In the 80s and 90s it was mallow flooding. They built defences and the flood moved to fermoy. Then it's moved on to Middleton.

I can only talk about the river here. It's much higher than years ago due to the shite in it. That then means, even in summer the water table around it is higher and the water comes up through the ground (banks are high from previous cleaning). Dropping the bottom of the river down allows more water to move.

I'll totally agree upland loss of tree cover on hills is a problem. That should be addressed. Though that won't help when there are deluges on the flats. Then we need to move the water faster, not let it burst banks sooner and spread out further.

The day that you post an excellent even handed analysis will be the day that Eamon Ryan finishes terraforming his Utopia on Mars.

It's quite amazing how basics of science and geography continue to elude you but you'll somehow manage to find the most random quack on the Internet to echo their guff. There's zero science or sense in that article.

I hate buzzwords, what the hell is climate neutrality?

In this metaphor we do, we stop causing the climate to change.

Whose we though? Little old Ireland? Can we do it??? Yes we can🔥🔥

Climate has always changed, our contributions to changing the atmospheric composition is minute - we've increased C02 from ~0.03% to ~0.04% in the last ~200 years. It's a sad state of affairs to see so much focus put on one issue that is rather small in the grand scheme of things when it comes to human influenced climate change or more appropriately human influenced micro-climate change.

The change of land use over the past two centuries is an often overlooked contributor to increased temperatures. Reduction in forest cover, increases in urbanised areas and suburbanised areas, increased desertification, changes in agriculture, drainage of wetlands etc... all seriously change how sunlight interacts with the nearest 50m of the atmosphere above the ground.

Weather patterns respond very much to the land beneath. Once such example is UHI (Urban Heat Island) and how they increase temperatures in some cases up to 10c higher than the surrounding countryside. There are numerous studies into how UHIs can exacerbate intense rainfalls upwind from the city centres.

Increased desertification allows for higher temperatures over the arid sands/soils - the sun has no "work" to do in drying out already dry sand and soil, all the energy goes into heating the air above the ground. We can even see such examples in Ireland, our highest temperatures are often during periods of drought. In 1887, Kilkenny recorded 33.3c - Ireland's national high temperature record and it was during the driest year on record - no co-incidence is it?

We are not causing all of it, we are though responsible where we have changed/altered the surface of the ground. But in order to survive as a species we have little choice in changing that surface for housing and foodstuffs. We need crops to grow where there once was forest, etc... however we do need to manage the surface, especially in sensitive areas where humidity levels are naturally lower in order to avoid increased desertification. If we can halt or even reverse desertification we reduce the increased heat zones and help keep average global temperatures at a sweet 15c.

Land use change makes a difference, but it is not the main driver of climate change - that is mans emissions.

No climate scientist had ever denied that climate change doesn't happen naturally - but all natural change has a cause and all the natural causes should be causing a slow return to an ice age.

That is not happening because we have overwhelmed the natural drivers with our man made changes to the atmosphere.

We can stop changing the atmosphere if we so choose. Whether we choose not to is the only issue of significance.

Cities account for a miniscule area of the planets surface - the urban heat effect is in no way the driver of current climate change. Even when accounted for in land temperature records there is still an overall heating trend in urban areas which has nothing to do with urbanisation.

"Watts was co-author with climatologists John Nielsen-Gammon, John Christy and Roger A. Pielke, Sr. on a paper with Souleymane Fall as lead author, which found that mean temperature trends were nearly identical between poorly sited and well-sited stations, but poor siting led to a difference in estimated diurnal temperature range. The poorly positioned stations led to an overestimate of trends in minimum temperatures, balanced by a similar underestimate of maximum temperature trends. This meant that the mean temperature trends were nearly identical across the stations.[56]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts_(blogger)

Anthony Watts the author of leading denial website Wattsupwiththat (source of all things climate denial) tried to pull the urban weather station biased hot scam on his followers/worshippers for nearly a decade. He eventually had to publish a paper which showed that urban weather stations correctly accounted for urban heat effects. He never apologised for calling scientists liars for years. It seems he has no actual shame as he has recently tried to revive the lie.

I don't suppose you will either.

What did you do for that training? Collect tokens off the cornflakes box? Your posts are full of complete nonsense, carefully selecting snippets and passing them off as gospel. Between yourself and Dacor, ye must've linked every biased page on the Internet and then have the audacity to whinge about data centres. Full of contradiction but carrying on like you are some sort of sage prophet. You've once again tied yourself up in knots responding to InatFullback so you resort to what you do best, post yet more streams of links and random names (who align with your agenda) to try and make yourself look good with "science" yet that one photo of a building showing flood levels undoes your entire argument.

Nope, cutting emissions won't reverse the harm we've already caused. We can only hope to prevent it from getting much much worse

What are you actually trying to say here? Another load of waffle. Temperature stations in urban areas will read higher than the surrounding countryside...

because urban weather stations cannot BUT account for UHI effects, because they're there, right bang in the middle of urban areas.

In other news, water is wet.

Believe it or not, but climatologists already know about urban heat islands and have accounted for it in the data.