No one can say we have not been warned. Despite a series of recent extreme weather events here – ranging from Storm Éowyn to Storm Chandra and exceptional unseasonal variations in rainfall noted by every farmer – we still try to cling to the comforting impression that climate change is something that happens somewhere else and in the future.
But that narrative has become impossible to sustain.
Last January, the European Union’s Copernicus climate change monitoring service projected that rising average global temperature would pass the critical limit of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 2030. This had previously not been expected to happen until 2040.
This is the upper threshold set by the 2015 Paris Agreement for the end of this century if we are to avoid the kind of consequences – flooding, drought, heatwaves, wildfires, famine, mass migration – that will make our world close to uninhabitable. So we are now just four years away from the advised heating limit set by Paris.
The prospect of a super-hot El Niño climate phenomenon in the Pacific this summer suggests we may see even worse climate news in 2026.
Last week, as reported by Caroline O’Doherty, Copernicus revealed that Europe, far from being insulated from such impacts, is now heating twice as fast as other continents. The service’s 2025 Europe report paints a worrying picture.
This is the best science available and it points directly to a radical threat to our wellbeing. Yet most EU governments continue to avoid taking the kind of necessary, if undoubtedly also radical, action needed even to begin to contain and reverse this situation.
The causes of human-generated climate change have been well established for decades. The release of increasing quantities of greenhouse gases – mainly carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – into the atmosphere creates a “blanket” that retains the sun’s heat on the planet’s surface and lower atmosphere instead of transmitting it harmlessly back into space.
Carbon dioxide is released by our use of fossil fuels in transport, manufacturing, building and deforestation. Methane is mostly released by livestock digestive systems and other agricultural activities as well as by mining and waste management.
One piece of good news in the Copernicus report is a rise in renewable energy uptake in Europe, now supplying 46 per cent of its electricity.
Leaving aside the massive impact of climate change denial by US president Donald Trump and similarly minded leaders, the speed of action in the face of this existential crisis by those who do recognise it leaves a great deal to be desired. A pertinent example is the failure of our own Government to publish its 2026 Climate Action Plan – which was due in January, delayed until April, and still not in sight.
The latest Copernicus report underlines what is at stake if we do not greatly increase our focus on finding and implementing solutions to climate change. The wildfire season in 2025, especially in Spain, was the worst on record. Overall in Europe more than one million hectares burned, 4.7 per cent more than the previous record from 2017. The report describes European air temperatures as “dangerously high”. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that usually cooler areas such as Scandinavia suffered from some of the worst anomalies.
During a three-week heatwave in Norway, Sweden and Finland, temperatures were higher than 30 degrees inside the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile, the Greenland ice sheet lost 139 billion tonnes of ice. There was a drop of 30 per cent in snow across mainland Europe.
The loss of this ice and snow leads to one of the insidious “feedback loops” by which one aspect of climate change accelerates another. White surfaces reflect the sun’s heat back into space in the so-called “albedo effect”. Diminishing white surfaces means more heat remains on Earth. As well as land surface heatwaves, a record 86 per cent of European seas recorded “strong” heatwaves last year. While Ireland’s land surface recorded the second highest average temperature on record, our west and southwest coasts experienced a heatwave described as “extreme” by the report.
And here again there is an increased danger of exacerbating feedback loops, where one problem triggers another. Vast underwater seagrass beds sequester and store carbon, diminishing the effects of climate change. If those beds die off due to excessive heating, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
This link between biodiversity (natural systems) and climate change is stressed in the Copernicus report. Climate change degrades biodiversity and degraded biodiversity accelerates climate change. This phenomenon gives added urgency to the recommendations presented to Government for the forthcoming Nature Restoration Law last week.
There are times – though these are becoming rarer – when climate change in Ireland can still seem almost benign. It has probably led to the arrival of beautiful new species such as the elegant little egret and the emperor dragonfly and possibly numbers of sunfish off Dingle. Some of us may even joke about the benefits of short-term temperature increases.
But the Copernicus report makes it clear that climate change’s negative and accelerating effects could very soon be overwhelming unless we take appropriate action rapidly. We may make individual contributions such as driving less, driving electric vehicles and retrofitting our houses. But above all we must insist to politicians, starting with those currently canvassing on some of our doorsteps, that this is the key issue of our times.
Paddy Woodworth is a research associate at Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, and adjunct senior lecturer in the school of languages and literatures, University College Dublin