Editorial: The climate is shown to be increasingly turbulent in Northern Ireland

To a remarkable extent, weather records have been pushed or broken in Northern Ireland this year.

​June was the hottest June on record in the province. July was the wettest ever. The summer was the warmest.

September saw Northern Ireland’s hottest ever September day (a sweltering 28.0 degrees Celsius in Castlederg on the eighth of that month). Christmas Day was one of the mildest December 25th​​​​​​​​​​s.

And overall the year is set to have been one of the 10 wettest, we report the Met Office as saying today. It is only two years since NI recorded its hottest ever recorded temperature, of 31.2C.

There have been reliable weather records since the late 1700s in Armagh, and over such a long period of time records tend only to be broken rarely, and by a small fraction. A hottest day in a particular month, for example, might stand as a record for 50 or 100 years or more. Now records are tumbling.

The same has happened in other countries. Both Canada and France saw their hottest ever temperatures not just beaten in recent years but smashed – France in 2019, and Canada in 2021.

Some people think that intense cold spells disprove global warming, but erratic weather is part of climate change. The exact causes of the change are debated but there is a scientific consensus that human activity has been a massive contributor.

All the major nations including China accept that there needs to be behavioural change, but beyond that there is no agreement.

Overly ambitious targets, such as NI’s current Net Zero target, will not be met. However, great technological change in areas such as solar will be part of the future.

The newly released cabinet papers yesterday revealed why a nuclear power plan for Lough Neagh was shelved. Stormont today would never consider such a plant, yet the new smaller nuclear reactors should be part of NI’s energy mix.