Storm Éowyn has left a complicated legacy

Storm Éowyn left a lot of things in its wake. After days of disruption, cold and frustration, people all along the Atlantic coast and along the Border will be left reflecting on what this miserable experience means.

There will be plenty to reflect on, the rural/urban divide being one. There will be clear and very sure views on that one. But another of the legacies of this storm is more complicated and will have a contradiction at its heart.

For many, the storm will put to bed any argument about whether climate change is real. The days of most people being sceptical or even dismissing it are fading away. Something is changing in the climate. As we all know, this has been said with authority in the media for many years. Panels of leading scientists have established an overwhelming consensus about what is happening, and why it is happening. The evidence is in.

That is often done in big-picture terms, with lots of big figures and confusing jargon. Sometimes the descriptions and examples of what climate change will mean feel too dramatic to be believable, too large scale for us to comprehend, or are just not understandable in terms of common life experience.

But the awareness of climate change has spread beyond the media and the panels of international scientists. People in ordinary conversation now talk about it and, even before this storm, they have been talking about it in ways that reflect their everyday lives. From my experience, it is more noticeable in the West than the East, for the very understandable reason that people in the West are closer to nature. They sense it in a way urban people can’t.

And those senses have been telling people things. Before last week, they have noticed it more slowly, with the absence of frost, or more subtly, with the ocean water being slightly warmer, or more earthily, in the absence of dead flies on your windscreen or crawlies under your shovel when you dig. People might not be able to explain all the science of this in high falutin’ terms, but they know it ain’t good, and they have known it long before those storm winds blew.

But those storm winds certainly brought that feeling to a head, brought it to the surface dramatically – with winds of a type that our oldest and most astute people cannot recall in their lifetime.

Something is causing that and the scientists have told us what it is. Of course, there are those who may yet argue it has nothing to do with human activity – especially not the activity they are themselves involved in – and despite the headwinds against them, I guess they will go on tilting at that windmill all they want. If such people imagine they are being duped, perhaps they might consider why Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland so badly. Despite what he says publicly about climate change, could it be that he knows something about what is ahead for that land much of whose underground riches are – currently – made inaccessible by ice? And are we to believe that that process has nothing to do with ‘drill, baby, drill’?

The position is simple. The climate is changing, human activity is behind it, and it is an ill wind. Storm Éowyn confirmed that in spades. But the contradiction arises because of what the storm led many to conclude about what they need to do in response to such events.

Climate change is caused by human activity, the release of carbon into the atmosphere. But last week, it was the open fire, often burning turf, that saved many from a week of even worse hardship. Many – especially our older residents – would have had to leave their homes without the open fire. Those without it were in real trouble.

Those who are worried about insects and other creatures will now find themselves having a harder argument to make when they say we should not cut hedgerows as we do. Many will now argue that cutting them even more vigorously is necessary. And that is before you say a word about trees. Trees are a carbon sink, they absorb carbon and so help us to reduce the net amount of carbon we emit into the atmosphere, and thus reduce the severity of climate change. But how do you tell that to someone who has just seen multiple trees knock down the electricity cable bringing power, light and heat to their home?

What do these events mean for the drive towards electrifying so many additional aspects of our lives? Even those with solid fuel stoves were unable to light them because of the absence of electricity for the pump. What about those with no chimney who purely rely on electricity for warmth? The solar panel wasn’t much help in late January. 

People all over the region drove distances during the days after the storm to get petrol and diesel: how can they now be persuaded to go for an electric car, or resist those who tell them to switch away from the one they have? And while it might fade, as each day after the storm passes, what will the demand for diesel generators do for our climate emission targets?

And so there is the contradiction from this storm. Climate change is real and it is caused by human activity, but when the storm intensified by climate change hits us, it increases the demand and need for the very things that are causing it in the first place. 

The storm proved to many that climate change is real – and made it harder to do something about it. This will shape opinions on these matters as carbon-reducing measures are discussed over the coming years. Some, ever hostile to any change, will bring in further arguments, ones we have heard before but which will be given a sharper edge: we are small in the world, and what can we do about it; it isn’t fair on our sector of life, others should do more; and what about the data centres? All of this and more will be heard.

But we surely know we can’t listen to this and do nothing. So when it is said that it was the fault of trees, we must talk about what we do to protect the power lines from trees. When people say we still need solid fuel, we need to work harder to find alternative and more resilient ways to keep people warm when the storm breaks. And when people say I am not changing because it is someone else’s fault, we’ll all to have work harder to make the point that that is no way to live. Because neither is living in a world of climate chaos. The region got a taste of that last week, and nobody wants any further helpings.