The litany of big-impact climate-related events that rocked the world in 2025 tended to put Ireland in the shade – and a relatively comfortable and cool shade at that.
Fires consumed sprawling suburbs in California, floods displaced millions in southeast Asia, Hurricane Melissa shredded Jamaica and severe heatwaves crippled many countries in Europe, with heat stress indicators showing “feels like” temperatures of more than 46 degrees.
Compared with that, Ireland’s experience seemed mild.
And yet, there was a storm, Éowyn, that brought hurricane-force winds, causing extensive damage and disruption, and another, Claudia, that caused intense and shockingly fast-rising localised floods.
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By contrast, rain was so scarce in some places that parts of the country were in drought from late spring – the earliest such conditions on record.
And then much of the population slept poorly during a strange summer when sticky night-time temperatures fell only a few degrees below daytime, making the overall season the hottest on record.
Out of pocket, out of home in some cases, and out of patience in many – these events tested how we lived, worked, travelled and sourced essential services.
The latest analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows those tests are going to get harder.
The last 11 years have been the warmest on record globally and Copernicus scientists say they fully expect 2026 to make it 12 out of 12, with the pattern to continue.
Warmer temperatures bring more climate disruption, which creates more extreme weather events.
A signature effect is the increased water vapour that warmer air holds. At least, it holds it until it drops it in the kind of explosive and destructive downpours that are becoming more common in Ireland.
But this country is not immune to heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and super-strength storms either, and as an island it is also extremely vulnerable to sea level rises and coastal erosion.
The Copernicus team sees no improvement in the underlying conditions that exacerbate these events in the near future, predicting that temperatures will continue to rise incrementally year after year unless something drastic changes.
Prof Peter Thorne, director of the Icarus Climate Research Institute at Maynooth University, sees no signs of such a turnaround.
“It’s another sad milestone in a very long series of milestones telling us we’re pointed fundamentally in the wrong way,” he said of the Copernicus report.
“We have ever-increasing evidence that Ireland’s climate is changing in pretty profound ways ... but there is a complete lack of political will to enact those solutions at the speed and scale required.”
