Professor Sonia Seneviratne:

Different things can be done on communication. The Deputy mentioned the meteorological services. There are specifically two topics on which the meteorological services could do more communication including here in Ireland. I mentioned whether this summer was related to climate change. On the level of communication it is important to do climactic attribution so that whenever there is an event we should look at what was the contribution of greenhouse gas forcing to those events. Some countries are considering doing some operational event attribution, for instance in Germany. It may be difficult to develop a new system in Ireland; maybe it could be done in collaboration with other weather services. It would be very powerful to be able to say that a particular event may have been made stronger because of climate change, for example identifying it was three times more probable as a result. In terms of communications it gets the message across very quickly.

What I was showing in climactic analysis is very coarse. As it is based on those global scenarios, we do not have a focus on Ireland. We cannot really provide country-based information. I was trying to extract the information I could. For instance, we recently developed climate scenarios for Switzerland where we co-ordinated with MétéoSuisse, the Swiss weather centre. As the Deputy said, the weather centres have a good reputation among the population. It would be useful to have them more involved in the development of this type of information and also having the scenarios targeted for a country because then people can basically consider what the actual implications for the country would be. This would also be a useful development.

The Deputy asked what the impacts for Ireland would be. Of course, the report contained a really broad assessment. I cannot speak specifically to Ireland. It is clear that all locations have an increase in temperature extremes. In high latitudes to mid latitudes, such as here, we have an increase in heavy precipitation, which is also associated with more flooding. I do not know about droughts, which is a difficult topic. We see that the probability is higher. We would not expect such an increase, but there was a summer drought so maybe we are not sure yet. Of course, a sea-level rise could be relevant for coastal regions.