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MANY PEOPLE DREAM of a white Christmas, but we may have to become used to a sodden Christmas instead due to climate change.
A white Christmas has always been a rare occurrence in Ireland and is becoming rarer still due to climate change, according to Met Éireann.
While there will be a brief cooler spell today, it won’t bring any snow as temperatures are not cold enough to bring any wintry precipitation.
Paul Moore is a climatologist at the State’s meteorological service and explained that a white Christmas is one where there is lying snow at 9am at one of the main primary stations.
The last time that happened was during the Big Freeze of 2010, and it’s happened nine times in all since 1964.
Back in 2010, the highest total of lying snow in Ireland on Christmas Day was recorded – 27 centimetres at Casement Aerodrome.
“But with climate change, cold extremes are becoming both less severe and less frequent,” Moore told The Journal.
“There are fewer cold nights and cold days on average, so with that, there’s going to be less chance of snow in general and of a white Christmas.”
The average December day now has a mean temperature of around seven degrees.
While Moore notes that December, January, and February are still the most likely months for Ireland to get snow, he adds that climate change means “one day events like a white Christmas become less common”.
Speaking to The Journal, environmental journalist John Gibbons recalled the Big Freeze of 2010.
He noted that while overall temperatures in Ireland are tracking the global average temperature rise, there can still be occasional and intense cold snaps.
“It was absolutely intense for around three weeks,” said Gibbons on the 2010 Big Freeze.
“The scientists looked at that event and it was considered to be due to increased waviness of the jet stream.”
Gibbons describes the jet stream as a “high-altitude, fast-moving air current that is pinned between the North Pole and the mid latitude”.
“This is a fast-moving zone, it’s called the jet stream because that’s where a jet aircraft literally flies in and that’s why it’s much faster to come back from America to Ireland than it is to go from Ireland to America, because the jet stream is traveling so quickly.”
Gibbons explained that the jet stream is the main controller of weather systems in the northern hemisphere, but that it is “becoming erratic”.
“Occasionally, it will wobble a huge blob of cold air over Europe that’s what happened in Ireland in 2010,” added Gibbons.
He also noted that this type of extreme cold, though rare, “is ironically one of the signatures of global warming, which is a destabilisation of the jet stream”.
While Gibbons said we will have fewer white Christmases on average in the future, he added that we will “still have occasional cold snaps, particularly ones related to the jet stream”.
Despite the possibility of a cold snap, Gibbons told The Journal that the “general climatic shift in Ireland is that we’re moving towards drier, warmer summers, and wetter, milder winters”.
“The amount of rainfall in Ireland in the last couple of decades has increased by 7%, it’s a huge change and one of the reasons we’re seeing more and more flooding events,” said Gibbons.
“With every additional degree of global warming, we get an extra 7% precipitation in the atmosphere.
“Assuming global warming continues on its current path, it’s going to get an awful lot wetter in Ireland.
“I think it’s far more likely that we’ll have sodden Christmases rather than white Christmases.”
However, there is what Gibbons refers to as a “joker in the pack”, which is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
It’s an Atlantic current more commonly known as the AMOC.
“That’s the current that draws up warm, salty water from the Caribbean, and basically warms North-west Europe,” Gibbons told The Journal.
“That’s the reason we have the mild temperatures that we have in Ireland. At our latitude, we’re on the same as that of Newfoundland in Canada, which is frozen for seven or eight months of the year.
Gibbons warned that the AMOC has slowed down by about 15% in the last two to three decades.
A study published in Nature in July of this year had a “95% confidence range” that the collapse of the AMOC will occur between 2025 and 2095.
“In the event of an AMOC shutdown, we’re going to have a much colder climate in Ireland and across Northwestern Europe, which is kind of ironic that that would happen inside a global warming event,” said Gibbons.
“You’d have regional cooling set against a fast-warming globe.
“It that were to happen, it would mean not just white Christmases, but white Januarys and Februarys, probably white all the way out to May, starting in about September, in the event that we lost all or most of the heat energy from the AMOC.”
Gibbons added that the AMOC is the reason why a typical November’s day in Ireland is around 12 or 13 degrees, instead of two or three degrees.
“If one was looking for a white Christmas in the future, in an AMOC collapse scenario, we would have a climate similar to Northern Canada and that wouldn’t necessarily wouldn’t suit us, let’s just say.
“We’ve kind of evolved to our mild climate pretty well in agriculture and our transport system.
“Everything here in Ireland is built around this climate system, so it would be nice to hang on to this climate system if possible,” said Gibbons.
Gibbons added that the AMOC is a “very big system and it’s unlikely to simply switch off”, and that he doesn’t foresee it shutting off before 2050.
However, he noted that it is “beginning to break down and it’s definitely slowing and losing energy and there is a critical point at which it will stop”.
In that scenario, Gibbons told The Journal that “weather systems will turn upside down” and that “super” storms would develop which are “storms beyond anything that modern humans have experienced”.
“The consequences of the AMOC shutting down would be just unimaginable because this is the climatic system that we have evolved to work with.”
Meanwhile, Met Éireann climatologist Paul Moore told The Journal that “some research is saying that we may have started towards an AMOC collapse”.
However, he added that if the AMOC does collapse, “there won’t all of a sudden be snow every day in the winter”.
“It’s a gradual thing over 50 to 100 years where it’ll gradually get colder in the winter here due to the cooler temperatures that the collapse of AMOC would bring,” said Moore.
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I hope the automatic weapons are better secured than the TVs!
Aren’t they lucky the boys weren’t there when they broke in!!
Surely by going public and disclosing what was taken the Burglars now about the garda involvement in the premises. I hope the gardai now vacate the premises. To use a phrase used in many a film ” position compromised”.
When my house was broken into recently I was told that there was a good chance if I went to balbriggan or fairy house markets I would find my belongings I suggest they do the same see how that goes for ya….
This premises is probably one of many locations the ERU have. No firearms or confidential documents would have been left there, even in a lock up, if it was not going to be supervised. This is just a typical bandwagon story that sells papers and gives people a chance to give out.
3 tv’s were takin and I would be confident in sayin very little if anything else was!!! BOTTOM LINE, it makes a good headline for the papers….
They robbers might get a surprise when they go to use the remote.
Why don’t they take the gardai off shatters door and put them minding premises like this. Get your priorities right Callinan!
They stolen all the toilet seats too.
Even now, they have nothing to go on.
i will give them a good price for an alarm on the gaff might even do it for cash
I really dont understand why the stores werent on a 24 hour guard like the army stores?
Sure if the burglars now know its the operational headquarters for the guards they will tell any other criminals they know where it is.point being u might as well appeal for witnesses as the cat is out of the bag anyways.no point in not moving if the criminal fraternity know where it is.
If it was used for admin purposes you would hope that no sensitive information was taken. Tv’s aren’t a big deal but confidential files getting into the wrong hands could have major consequences…I wouldn’t want to be on a witness protection program knowing that this can happen so easily
Confidential files can get into anybody’s hands given that Gardai are apparently using their own laptops as they wish.
you mean in here as well
@brian daly, ‘apparently’ they use their own laptops eh? Care to elaborate?
Witness protection Irish style.
Move back to the UK where you have fammily and come home again for weddings or social occasions.Like Steve Collins does in Limerick.
Witness protection anywhere else.
You and your fammily disapper for good under new passports,IDs ,names and backstopped aliases.
You DO NOT ever ,never go back to your old haunts,habits or make contact with your old way of life or friends or kin. Costs lots of money and resources.
So much for security. That place should have been well secured and monitored. Are they telling us that there was no CCTV? That place should have been like Fort Knox – easy to get into, impossible to get out of. No doubt someone is going to get their butt kicked over this.
Here in US giggling to myself reading this story. My US friends curious to know what’s it about. Too embarrassing to show them
Why is it embarrassing!? The article said it was a facility used by the specialist unit not its headquarters or operational base. It could be a firing range or self defence training area where the televisions were used for playback instruction or monitoring the process! As said before there were no firearms or sensitive documentation stored there and the location was most likely alarmed only with such low Garda numbers a response mightened have arrived in time to prevent the theft. This break-in is no different to any other break-in where its only the fact that the Gardai use it and don’t want attention drawn to it by giving out its location to the national media seeking assistance that makes it unusual! I doubt junkie burglars read the journal every day with their morning methadone so it’s not like they’d be back!
Not good to hear, but the Garda ERU have a number of secretive lock-ups around the country apparently. No firearms or weapons are stored in them, only at Garda Stations. The place will be forensically examined, so there’s a good chance these eejits will be caught!
If this is an april the 1st joke its in bad taste .Its not funny
And a day late..
If the public don’t know the location of the facility, the only way they can provide information is to have been one of the people who took part in a burglary between Sunday night and yesterday morning, where three flat-screen TVs were taken, somewhere within Ireland.
So in affect are the Gardaí asking the people who took part to hand themselves in?
Theyre not asking for the publics assistance
g why
Ah shur look, harmless auld craic in fairness.
slow news day was it journal.ie
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