Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
THERE’S no cold there. We light the fire at night but that’s
more for the brazen comfort of the flames and to keep away the bit of
damp. But even into November there’s no cold there.
Walking in the fields during the week the dogs run ahead and the birds
sing from the trees. The leaves are still on the branches and it is hard
to believe we are so far into the year. After the long hot summer will
winter come at all?
The swallows have finally gone and there is a chill in the shade or in
the morning but winter is still off-stage.
Bulbs in the ground seem to be getting ready to grow rather than retreat.
Is this global warming?
Already we have had early flooding with roads impassable and fields under
water.
We are coming out of the warmest summer here in Ireland since 1995 some
of which I spent in Donegal hearing people saying they’d never known
weather like it.
Now I read that the summer just gone was the warmest up there since records
were first kept at Malin Head in 1885. Then we had the warmest September
on record and October and now November pass in days of bright sunshine.
One bright morning I am driving down a quiet lane where I go to walk the
dogs through a wood and down past a river. My young nephew is in the back.Something
in the road moves heavily ahead of us. I think maybe a goat or a donkey.
As we pull level I stall the car in surprise. A few yards away a stag
Sika deer stands and looks at us with curtains of vegetation hanging from
his antlers.
He looks like something out of a myth.
I ask around but no-one seems to think they were around here.
How could such a big beast pass unnoticed?
Then my mother tells me someone else recalls seeing one recently too and
someone else and someone else. So there are deer in the woods too. Just
how much do any of us know of this world around us?
The 10 warmest years in the world in the last millennium have all occurred
since 1990.
If that’s not global warming what is?
Now we are being warned that the fish in the sea are running out and Ireland
has been forced to stop drift netting to try to save the wild Atlantic
salmon.Every year new species from warmer waters are turning up in Irish
waters.
If that’s not global warming what is?
We are being warned that an oil crisis is waiting down the road for our
children and it becomes increasingly clear that the only dissenting scientific
voices about the environmental crisis we are facing are those in the pay
of the energy industries.
With blinkers on our government still thinks we need more and more road
building.
I sometimes think my kids could plan it all out better which would be
funny except for the realisation that it is our kids who will have to
live with the consequences of what these grey-haired men in their grey
suits do for short-term gain.
Then I read that another consequence of global warming will be severe
disruption to food production. Just as I think Ireland seems set on diminishing
its agriculture to the level of a hobby.
Then I go to the supermarket and shop for simple vegetables and fruit
that could be grown in my own backyard and see that they are imported
from New Zealand or China.
Does that make any sense?
One night I go out the door and the moon is so big and high I could sit
and read by it.
Who would not see how beautiful that is?
Then the morning comes and at last the cold has arrived and there is a
frost on the grass and the real bite of early winter.
Our breath is like smoke and the starlings at the top of the trees are
in their winter coats.
Now we light the fire early in the day and I read somewhere that half
an acre of planted and managed ash could keep you in firewood for years
and years and years.
On the beach as we walk the air cools quickly as the day dies and at last
the year has truly turned.
The children and the dogs seem oblivious though and paddle and splash
in the sea whatever the temperature. Sea birds fly slowly in and out over
the waves and the moon is rising again.
I have seen otters not far from here and crowds have watched dolphins
in the bay.
Further out huge whales float silently, majestically by unaware they are
to be hunted again.
Has winter arrived?
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