And so is this a failure of government to do ruthless prioritisation when it comes to that investment piece, the finance, the political will piece? Where are the quickest wins here, Peter Thorne, when it comes to really grappling with this, ensuring there's better preparation at a community level that they can react, but ensuring when we're in futuristic mode, we're bringing down an 11-year stat to something that probably looks much more short-termistic?

There's all kinds of things that we need to do.

The programme for government talked about an emergency relief scheme for citizens when they are impacted.

That's not yet in place.

People need, in the immediate term, financial help when they're impacted.

We need to have these community hubs that were mentioned in the previous piece.

But also we need to do the hard yards of protecting our citizens, which means large investment, but it means investment in both hard infrastructure and nature-based solutions, including paying our farmers to flood much of the land to protect towns and cities.

What does that say to you about the level of prioritisation commitment from the current government?

Are there simply a lot of things outside of our control, natural disasters and events and even wars that really make a lot of the progress we're making insufficient?

Well, there are certainly many, many things happening, which further 2020 scriptwriters should have done a long time ago.

But there are many things that are in our control.

So I wouldn't frame it as hopelessness.

And many of the things that are going on in the world, if we weren't wedded to fossil fuels, we would not be in the mess we're in right now.

Imagine a world, a different world that 20 years ago, we took the plunge and really went all in on electric vehicles like Norway did.

really went in on renewable energy like Denmark did, where today we would be powered by renewable energy.

Yeah, what examples can you give to what could happen in that scenario, three degrees Celsius of warming?

We're a bit nervous heading into the winter, and, uh, we're really not prepared, are we?

We're, we're not prepared.

We're not prepared in really important ways, and much of it, as we make clear in the report, is things that could be done, we've made clear in earlier chapters in the s- in the annual review.

For example, around the need for, um, shel- uh, shelters where people can go and be- get simple things, a warm meal, a hot cuppa, um, a warm shower.

Um, where the program for government called for provision of funding to affected individuals with minimal pa- paperwork to help them get back on their feet.

That is nowhere in sight at the present time.

Maybe it will come in the budget, um, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

But that is still, despite all we've been through, that is still a battle that's being fought and people w- objecting to these developments up and down the country.

How important are these temporary measures while we wait for the long-term scheme? Do they have any effect? Well...

Well, they will protect from a, if you like, a common garden flood, a relatively ordinary flood, not the floods that are ordinary, but you know what I mean.

They will protect from perhaps a one in 10, 20 year flood.

What they won't protect from is perhaps a much more substantial flood.

But then again, equally, it's important to note that even permanent flood defences will not protect from absolutely everything.

It is economically unfeasible to protect from a truly catastrophic biblical flood.

And we know those do occur if you look around the world.

How many surveys do you need, Professor? And, I mean, Ed Murphy outlined that these could be as much as €1 million per pop I mean, how many more surveys do they need for somewhere like Enniscorthy before they actually apply the

Are you worried that we're not going to focus too much on climate change when it comes to next week's budget?

I'm absolutely concerned about that.

The most effective way that we can adapt is to mitigate, to reduce our emissions.

We've got to get off fossil fuels.

We've got to do that for a whole bunch of reasons beyond climate change.

Look, fossil fuel crises are a feature, not a bug.

This is the sixth in my lifetime.

Do you think that we're going to get off the cycle from storm to storm and start dealing with it? It's hard to believe that we will when there are 288 flood prone sites proposed for rezoning by councillors are still building houses where we know there's going to be flooding and we know there's going to be more flooding as a result of climate change.

What are you talking about?

So we know that all of these events are being made more likely, more severe due to climate change.

And we fundamentally need to wake up to the fact that these punches will keep being landed on us.

And if all we're doing is trying to stand up and not roll with them, then we're in trouble.

What kind of planning then is required? We need to get very, very serious about investing in protecting the most vulnerable communities.

We know where those are, your Middletons, your Aniscorthes, etc.

And we need to get very, very serious about actually protecting them from flooding, for example.

What's your understanding as to why that hasn't been set up yet?

What does that mean?

So at the moment, if you emit a ton of CO2, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, about a third of that goes into the ocean and a third of that goes into the terrestrial biosphere.

There's no guarantee that that will continue in the long term.

Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that those sinks would weaken.

And that matters because the more we emit, the worse.

So what can be done then? What needs to be done is the same as I've said time and time again on this show and other shows.

We need to reduce emissions rapidly.

What are you expecting?

Now, the implications of this being possibly the severest El Nino ever, certainly since records began according to the WMO and no probably detailed records from the late 1800s, what are the implications of this severity?

So the implication is the largest and most predictable in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

So in North America, for example, in the US, they will have a very wet winter in California and up the West Coast.

A very warm winter probably in the interior north of North America.

Similarly, Australia, it's very highly predictable that in El Nino they will have drought.

So in certain regions of the world, particularly surrounding the Pacific, but also in India, the Indian monsoon already has been reduced this summer.

I was in India in August.

And finally, that terrible series of events in Nepal, which may have killed thousands of people, you know, is that attributable directly to climate change, melting glaciers that maybe didn't melt as precipitously heretofore?

Can you just explain please the difference between climate budget one and two?

So carbon budget one is the amount, uh, so we have a carbon budget paradigm at the moment in Ireland where we have said we will emit a certain...

We will allow the state to emit a certain amount of carbon in the period 2021 to 2025, and then a certain amount in 2026 to 2030, and then the c- council has provided a proposed budget for 2031 to 2035 that currently sits with government.

Um, and those are the amounts, and then government has taken those and divvied these out by sectors.

So the build- built environment sector has a sectorial ceiling that it must stay within, and it has managed to do that for 2021 to 2025.

But all the projections say it will not meet the second budget, which is more stringent.

The idea with these carbon budgets is we will get to a point where we have net zero emissions from, from Ireland PLC, where Ireland is no longer contributing to the problem of climate change.

What do you say to them?

[laughs]

And my wife, uh, they said that, well, we'd never turned anybody down, so if somebody would phone to say, "Can you ask the computer the name of an African tree starting with Z?" So she'd go off to the library and try and find it for them [laughs] because she didn't want to disappoint them, but the computer wasn't going to do that.

All the way down under, before the internet made it possible to share knowledge at the drop of a hat, Australia was making its own strides in computing.

It's a symbol of innovation, which I think is so important that we are an innovative nation, and we are, but it's not recognized by the media and by the public as it ought to be.

So and we're not at the end of this.

People in Australia are working on quantum computing, so who knows where that will go.

But it was hard to see where computing would go at the beginning.

How can we sort of foresee the future?

Peter Thorne is Professor in Physical Geography at Maynooth and I asked him to explain why the 1887 figure is in doubt.

So we got a class of Master's students a few years ago to look at it using the techniques of the World Meteorological Organisation used to verify records And we found a lot of doubt over it.

We don't know much about where the station even was within Kilkenny Castle.

We don't know a huge amount about the history.

There's probably just insufficient evidence to be absolutely certain of that record.

Whereas the 33 degrees we experienced at Phoenix Park in 2022, that's rock solid.

So should it stand as the record or not, do you think?

So that is the prerogative absolutely of MetErin and MetErin to their great credit went and did a study after the study we did it's not been as publicised but you can find it on the records page of MetErin and they themselves said there isn't sufficient evidence to be absolutely sure of this record but they've taken a precautionary approach and said we want to keep the record But you'll notice a lovely asterisk against that value, which is pointing to their study, which builds on ours, which also says we can't be sure.

Is there any way, in your opinion, to target those grants towards the less well off?

Well, you could make much larger grant, grants that are targeted specifically to people given s- personal circumstances, but that gets very hard.

There are also things that are done in other countries, like 0% or very low interest loans, perhaps on longer terms than typical commercial loans, which would open up EV ownership, retrofit, and other climate actions to a far broader range of society.

Basically, when you give a grant, you g- you're throwing 5,000, 10,000 to the commercial sector, never to be seen again.

And if instead you do loans, when those loans are being repaid, that's money coming back in that you can loan back out, so that money doesn't just disappear.

That is recycled time and time again, and able to be used to accelerate climate action far more effectively.

Uh, but while he's having that engagement with you, he's also, he says, negotiating with the European Commission, uh, to avoid fines for missing targets.

So we're well, we're well off track for, for both, uh, our national commitment on carbon budgets one and two, um, our ambition for 51% reduction by 2030.

What's your main concern about the way the current government supports are structured?

So the current government supports are effectively transferring taxpayers' money to the very richest in society.

I'm a professor.

There's no secret that professors in Ireland are well-paid.

I can afford to pay for an EV and get a private loan, so that 5,000 I don't need, fundamentally, whereas people who are on a median income, your average earner in the country, they cannot afford to access, they still cannot afford the ticket price.

We have to find better ways of doing this.

The other thing is that that's just 5,000 euros being transferred to private industry.

And yet you're still being asked, as a low-income household or a lower to middle-income household, to take on extra debt, aren't you? Even if it is a, a zero or low-cost loan that you have to pay back, a lot of people might be reluctant to do that, uh, particularly when it comes to the bigger loans that you might see for retrofitting.

Peter, those impacts that we are seeing, I know they are obviously wide ranging, but can you give us some of the key ones in your assessment?

so the warmest summer on record was found to be much more likely due to climate change and that has real impacts demonstrable impacts upon human health heat comfort animal animal welfare including cattle and then the flooding that we've seen over the last autumn and winter again made more likely more severe due to climate change That's one of the key new things that we have, a new tool in our toolkit for Ireland is the ability to be able to attribute these events to humans and make very, very much clearer the direct line of evidence between our burning of fossil fuels and the impacts we see on the ground.

And in terms of getting on top of those, the emissions of greenhouse gases and the burning of fossil fuels, what do you hope for in response to this report?

So this report is simply the first part in our series of annual review chapters that we will put out through the year.

We will move on to, for example, the next one will be electricity sector.

We've been putting these to the government for the past decade.

They've had lots of recommendations.

If those recommendations had been fully enacted, We would be much less dependent upon fossil fuels today, which means we would be much more economically resilient to what is hitting us right now with the fallout of the energy crisis arising from the Iran war.

Now, why is there a difference there? Or is that, again, just kind of a tradition?

It's, again, tradition.

Also, in much of the UK, traditionally, it was based upon the equinoxes and the solstices.

So in America, it's 21st of March to 21st of June, and then summer is 21st of June to 21st of September, etc., etc.

These are all just different ways of doing it.

This is just the humans trying to split the cycles up.

You know, and plants don't care about what we define.

Yeah, and given you're a climate scientist, given the fact that our climate is changing, are those definitions of what constitutes summer, what constitutes winter, are they changing slightly?

Am I being a little unkind there?

Well, what actually happened, I think, was that it was a CSIRO machine, although it was in the grounds of Sydney University.

And by about 1955, a remarkable person had appeared at Sydney University itself in the person of Harry Messel.

a notable and very energetic person.

He decided that he would import the design of a computer for the United States.

By now, computers were pretty well accelerating in interest and in use.

So he started to build Celiac, which was a copy of an Iliac, an American machine.

And in 1960, where is it? In 1960, the age in Melbourne had this terrific story because the computer had been taught to sing.