COLM TOBIN: Our freakishly mild weather and shorts in November isn’t normal

WHERE is November gone? Has anyone seen it? Did it slip into some pub snug to hide in a corner listening to Fairytale Of New York? Maybe it’s just running away from all the Black Friday nonsense that’s on the horizon.

It feels like only yesterday we were barbecuing in the August sunshine, and Christmas felt like a twinkling port on some distant shoreline. Suddenly, here we are, a hop skip and a jump from Santy and not a present bought yet.

Speaking of the lad with the white beard, I wonder how he’s getting on with the electricity bills? Surely the elves have figured out some geothermal heating solutions at this stage? I hope he’s thinking ecologically when it comes to the wrapping paper. Glitter is not acceptable with the youngsters these days. Santa doesn’t want to get cancelled, like.

Maybe it’s the freakishly mild weather we’ve been having this week, but it certainly doesn’t feel like winter, does it?

Earlier today, as if in a dream, I saw a young lad in shorts sauntering along the promenade in Clontarf, like the last swallow of summer, hanging on to some dream of living in Home & Away.

Lads, it’s not normal.

While I was in LA last week, it rained for three days straight, their first rain since March, which is a difficult thing to imagine here on Squelchy Island. They loved it there of course. The scorched hillsides by the Hollywood sign were glad of the drop of moisture. We spent a surreal 30 minutes on a ride around Mulholland Drive, failing to view the city below through the mist.

It was a welcome watery break in a state that is devastated by drought and the ever-present threat of forest fires which are never far from their minds in California. There, climate change has much more urgent and potentially dramatic consequences.

Here in Ireland, it still feels like we are slightly in cloud cuckoo land, and our tendency towards exceptionalism is very much on display when it comes to our carbon footprint and the steps were are taking, or not, towards net zero.

Sure why would we cut our agricultural emissions when the Chinese aren’t sorting out their industrial pollution?

I suppose I’m one to talk, flying to LA and back for an animation event.

We had a reminder of the strength of the elements on the way home from LAX in our otherwise comfortable direct flight to Dublin. We were caught inside a short burst of extreme turbulence over The Rocky Mountains, which took us on a little unexpected rollercoaster ride at 30,000 feet.

I’m a recovered nervous flyer, having found a way to let go of my lack of control in an airborne tin can, so this was a good test of my newfound confidence in the air.

I came through surprisingly well – I find it helps when I close my eyes and cast my mind back to travelling on the back of a tractor over a bumpy field with my grandfather as a child. The bumps and dips in the aeroplane are really no more severe than that furrowed field somewhere in Camus. Breathing also helps.   

After the drama, one of my colleagues asked the air hostess if turbulence was a regular occurrence over the Rockies and she replied that it was nothing to do with the mountains at all.

It turns out we had been caught up in the death throes of Hurricane Nicole as it fizzled out over the mid-West. It was a slightly terrifying reminder of our smallness in the face of nature’s wrath.

And a reassurance of the quality of our aviation engineering and the skill of our pilots.

In Ireland, we are rarely visited by the climatic extremes experienced in other parts of the world. Over the years, I’ve come to really love and appreciate our gentle seasons, the variety of our weather and our general distance from real meteorological drama.

We are lucky to have it and I feel we will be increasingly glad of it. Even if the storms and floods battering our coasts every year are getting markedly more severe.

Still, as we heard during the Cop 27 event, no country will be left unscathed by the societal turbulence that global warming is guaranteed to unleash, even in the best-case scenario.

Interparish rivalry!

I’M a bit late to it but congrats again to Clon and Ross for their big wins at the Tidy Towns! I’ve written it here before but I think these national competitions can be a very powerful tool in our fight to reach our climate targets. There is no better motivator for Irish communities than a bit of bitter interparish rivalry and I think the sustainability and biodiversity elements already in the competition could be even more to the fore.

As we know, individual changes are not going to turn the tide against global warming, but every step is important and even more so at the community level. Here here to all the great volunteers!

Avian flu outbreak

IT’S been a nervy week for turkey farmers with the news of an outbreak of avian flu in Co Monaghan. In a call back to Covid times, a 3km-restriction zone and a 10km-surveillance zone were enforced by Department of Agriculture officials to prevent further spread. Obviously, these businesses need all the support government can give to give to help them through a difficult period.

A broader question is how sustainable our consumption is, in general, running up to Christmas, with mountains of plastic and paper set to be deployed over the coming months in a consumerist rush. It was estimated that around one million turkeys are eaten here every year for Christmas. You’d wonder if this virus outbreak is just another gentle reminder from the planet that, all in all, this isn’t a very sustainable way to live.