Irish floods
© Brenda Fitzsimons/The Irish Times Flooding along the banks of the Shannon near Athlone. Winters will be much stormier and wetter in the coming years, climate researchers have warned.
Summers will be hotter and drier and winters will be much stormier and wetter in the coming years, climate researchers have warned.

It is all part of a "new normal" brought to us by global warming.


Comment: The scientific research is corrupted and the global warming proponents have manipulated the data to fit a political agenda at the expense of humanity.

Gone is the notion of a "hundred-year storm" or "20-year rainfall". The coming decades in Ireland will be marked by extreme seasonal conditions, say researchers at Maynooth University.

It means weather records will be set and reset as the new normal brings these exceptional conditions.

The team studied 150 years of Irish weather data, picking out examples of the wettest, stormiest, driest and hottest of years and defined the likelihood of these extreme events happening again.

Using climate models they then projected forward 100 years to see how often extremes might occur when in lock-step with overall climate change.

The results published in the journal Climate Risk Management make for shocking reading.

The summer of 1995 was our driest and warmest on record but the chance of such weather occurring again has become 56 times more likely compared to the risk in 1900.

Our wettest winter so far was 1994-95 and the likelihood of a similar winter has now doubled compared with how things were in 1850, the researchers found.

It gets worse according to the mathematical modelling done as part of this ongoing study.

The chance we will smash the hottest summer record will have jumped 250-fold as we reach the closing decades of this century.

And by that time one in eight winters will be setting rainfall records as the wettest yet experienced.

These are not just numbers and the possibility of a sunny day at the seaside. Death rates go up in line with heatwaves, the researchers say.

We will struggle to manage the swings as we alternate between prolonged drought and flooding, with impacts on water resources and agriculture.

The research continues under the Irish Climate Futures: Downscaling for Decision Making project which Maynooth University's Dr Conor Murphy leads. He works with international partners including Dr Tom Matthews formerly of Maynooth and now with Liverpool John Moores University.

The goal is to provide governments with hard evidence about future conditions to help in decision making.

The research also helps break down the notion that climate change is off in the distant future and helps people who have experienced record-breaking weather conditions, to realise the true impact of what the future holds, Dr Murphy said.