ANOTHER LIFE: WHEN GRASS is drowned by the sea for a tide or two, it takes on a tarnished, ochreous look for quite a while, writes Michael Viney.
This month's storm surge reached right in behind the dunes, swelling the lake and sweeping through gates and fences, leaving shreds of seaweed almost alongside the rubbish in the car park.
It's easy to see at these times how, as sea level rises, the lowest pastures, rooted shallowly in ancient sand, will melt away into salt marsh, and the edge of the highest spring tides will lap at the true rocky feet of the hill beyond.
Living near water, whether it is still in the ocean or returning to it in rivers, keeps climate change always in mind - that and the new weight of raindrops of course. Few other countries have an image so bound up with rain as Ireland, so perhaps it should not surprise that the great Irish diaspora, attuned to soft days in an emerald isle, has inspired Changing Shades of Green, just published online by the Irish-American Climate Project (www.irishclimate.org). This arresting document twins science and sensibility in projecting Ireland's future in an unnaturally warming world.
With support from the Rockefeller Family Fund and other philanthropic sources, it marries the hard research of Icarus and the climate team in NUI Maynooth, to the cultural perspectives of American professor Kevin Sweeney, from California University, Berkeley, and Irish artists whose music, poetry and film-making are inseparable from landscape. The hope is that by learning what climate change could do to cherished images, memories and culture, the 80 million Irish living around the world might be urged towards some sort of resistance. This, of course, along with helping to inform the Irish themselves.
We are slowly absorbing the downside of Mediterranean sunshine and home-grown grapes in the forecast of droughts, floods and worrying storms.
While few essentials of the science distilled by John Sweeney's team at Maynooth will come as any great surprise, their presentations in Changing Shades of Green offer a clear and considered picture of things to come, from the ecological consequences to the death of the Irish potato. The impact of rain and opposite extremes of drought is coming sharply into focus. Donegal already averages one-third more rainfall in a year than it did in the early 1900s - a rate of increase to continue in the northwest in winter - while the south and east drift to summer drought and parched grass.
The growing intensity and duration of rainfall will not only bring more floods and bog-slides, but threatens the image - and reality - of the west of Ireland, in particular, as a salmon-angling paradise.
Along with strange things happening to Atlantic currents and their supply of prey, the salmon are returning to spate rivers that are increasingly prone to "extreme weather events". Droughts hold the fish back from swimming upstream; spawning grounds dry out or are swept away in floods. The new extreme parameters of climate threaten to crack the bogs open in summer droughts and sweep them off the mountains as the rains return. What has created and sustained them is the steady flow of moisture from the sky, the silver "skifts" of year-round showers.
This very gentleness of rain, with such a profoundly physical influence on landscape, has helped to shape the island's human culture and iconic images. It feeds, in turn, into manners, mores and art. In the cultural witness that interleaves the science of Changing Shades of Green, mountaineer and filmmaker Dermot Somers makes the point powerfully. "Everything in the Irish landscape depends on slow absorption, and slow release. That's how colour works and its how light works . . . We have been used to a slowness, a kind of seeping absorption, followed by a slow release of light and sensory images. That's what Irish lyric poetry expresses, what sean-nós singing evokes," he says.
Martin Hayes, perhaps the best-known Irish fiddler, says the rain is always part of his music. "That softness of the rain, it's there . . . That feeling you get when you look at the scene is right there in the music." The Irish landscape, he says, like American wilderness, "is important as an idea".
"People want to know that there are sacred places that we will protect. They want to know that we have a barometer in our being that stops us from doing the irreversible," he says.
Back in the science, the Maynooth researchers deal with the droughts in the east, resulting from higher evaporation and lower summer rainfall in the region. The flows in the Liffey, for example, which provides 80 per cent of Dublin's drinking water, could be 20 per cent lower than they are now and 50 per cent lower by mid-century.
The proposal to pipe water from Lough Ree, part of the Shannon system, has protest signs appearing at Athlone and there's a Shannon Protection Alliance gearing up for battle. "An already water-stressed Dublin now faces a water crisis," is the comment in Changing Shades of Green, "and Ireland is witnessing the first sign of California-style water wars."