Climate change will affect all

10 December 2014

PICTURE Strangford. A picturesque and beautiful coastal village tucked just enough inside the mouth of Strangford Lough to avoid the rolling Irish Sea swell.

The tide comes in and out daily and perhaps twice a year comes in a bit further than normal prompting householders by the quay to take sandbag action and pray a bit more than usual.

Now picture Strangford in 2100. The quay would be underwater daily, homes along the shore would have been abandoned and Kevin Og’s shop would look down on small boats moored on what was once the Lower Green.

This environmental nightmare is typical of what we can expect in Lecale from forecasts of a 1.2m rise in sea levels unless we tackle greenhouse gas emissions soon. And it gets worse. By 2300 sea levels could have risen by four metres which will profoundly change the entire topography of Down District.

A recent edition of the Down Recorder covered opposition by residents at Mullaghdrin Road near Ballynahinch to a wind turbine on a nearby hill. This was two days after the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, launched the latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel report on Climate Change (IPRCC) warning about the effects of climate change.

I know residents in Mullaghdrin mean well in trying to protect their views over our beautiful countryside, but they need to know that their rejection of renewable energy now will impact on how their children and grandchildren will live in the future. Last Christmas I helped residents in Killough, Coney Island, Ballyhornan and Strangford village shore up their houses with sandbags several times over the course of a week of high tides. This situation is only getting worse.

Most people still think that the impact of
climate change will only hit poor people far
away, if they think about it at all. I have taken three maps from NASA to show how my area of Lecale would be affected if everyone took the same attitude as in Mullaghdrin to renewable energy.

Map 1: The local sea-level is likely to be up to 1.2 meters by 2100 and four meters by 2300 if we don’t tackle greenhouse gas emissions soon. This means that Strangford, Killough, parts of Ballyhornan and other villages are in ‘deep’ trouble. The year 2100 is within the lifetime of some children living today in Mullaghdrin.

Map 2: These estimates assume that the current worries over the collapse of the west Antarctic ice-sheet do not come to pass. On its own, the west Antarctic could trigger a five metre rise in sea level which I have shown in the second diagram where most of the main towns in Down District disappear, Ardglass becomes an Island and Clough becomes a coastal resort.

Map 3: Ban Ki-Moon also expressed worries about the Greenland ice-sheet. If we leave Greenland to melt by not acting to reduce emissions (including Mullaghdrin emissions), it will trigger sea level increase of seven metres. Clearly this will take a long time, but the point that Ban Ki-moon makes is that we only have a short timescale to act before it will be too late to prevent it.

This scenario is shown in the third diagram. A new ‘Crossgar Bay’ will be overlooking what used to be Downpatrick and the archipelago formerly known as Lecale.

A rapid changeover to renewable energy and investment in energy efficiency
could limit sea level rises to less than a
metre. This would also create a massive annual increase in the wealth being created and kept in this area, as almost all Down’s local renewable energy projects are owned by local people.

It’s not just local electricity demand we
could supply. I helped local farmers and the
Ardglass Development Association make a
funding application last year for a pilot project using wind turbines to create a diesel substitute for cars or home heating by electrolysing water from Ardglass and nitrogen from the atmosphere.

There are also profound moral issues that the people of Mullaghdrin need to consider. Every time they flip the switch on the kettle for tea, they help push another African family off the land via desertification.

When they pop bread in the toaster, another family in Bangladesh is watching its land
being flushed out to sea. We may be rich
enough, and have enough land, to move the
citizens of Killough or Strangford to higher ground, but the Third World don’t have this choice. All they have are rickety boats risking dangerous sea journeys to an unwelcoming Europe.

I was reared by missionary parents in the Third World who helped build schools and hospitals in the 1960s. When I went back in the 90s I saw how these countries had been undermined largely by the selfish policies of governments in the so-called First World.

As a councillor in our new super council I will be campaigning to ensure that the new Area Plan for South Down will prioritise the infrastructure of renewable energy for three reasons:

1A report to be published at the end of this month calculates the economic benefit to this area already from the small amount of renewable energy installed locally. Tens of millions of pounds despite planning and negative electricity grid policies. We can reap even greater benefits for our area.

2Since 1870 sea levels have risen by less than 10 inches. Current official estimates suggest over one metre by 2100 and are continually being revised upwards and also ignore potential ice-sheet collapse.

3People living in our big towns and cities will be the most affected, as they are largely based on the coast. But Lecale and Ards will be the rural area most affected by global warming in Ireland.

I spend a lot of time working with the local farming community and have walked the land. I have seen for myself how high the old beaches used to be during the last period of global warming. Bernard Venny’s farm looking down on Minerstown is a perfect example. In Dundrum the beach overlooks the roofs of the houses from behind the village.

This situation is now serious enough to warrant the level of mobilisation last seen during the Second World War. Instead we see the UK government reducing incentives for renewable energy and playing down climate change in the face of a challenge by UKIP in the English Shires.

We can make different choices in South Down, and we can start in Mullaghdrin.

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