Madam, - August is known among journalists as the "silly season" - a time when they struggle to fill newspaper columns with items of interest as everybody heads for the nearest airport to flee their boring jobs and the bad weather. Nonetheless, your front page report, "Studies foresee acute water shortages in Dublin area" ( The Irish Times, August 22nd) struck this reader as sillier than most.
According to forecasts based on hydrological modelling by the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Unit at NUI Maynooth, drinking water availability for the greater Dublin area could be reduced by as much as 50 per cent by 2050 as volume levels drop in Liffey tributaries such as the Rye in north Kildare, while the population of the eastern seaboard rises to 2.4 million people. And the cause of this catastrophic drop in water levels? Global warming of course!
One wonders if the boffins at Icarus have spent so much time slaving over hot Bunsen burners that they have completely missed the recent weather patterns over this island - week after week of bucketing rain.
Closer reading of this article provides some reassurance, however. As with all climate change scare stories the language is speculative - "could be", "estimates", "likely" - so while all this might come to pass, equally it might not.
That's the problem with computer modelling in order to predict the future: the process is subjective. The model is designed according to your own specifications and fed with your own data and the results are interpreted in your own way.
Scientists are not infallible; as human beings, they can be as easily influenced by the prevailing orthodoxy and the pressing need to secure more funding, as by fact. Climate change is now big business, worth an estimated $2 billion annually in research grants from governments. Thus cries of wolf from the climate change industry become ever louder and more frequent in order to keep the cheques hitting the doormat.
It is vital that the paper of record challenges the consensus on global warming rather than merely regurgitating without question every doom-laden prognostication emanating from the laboratories of Ireland.
Perhaps it cannot because the press has allowed itself to become part of the group-think surrounding climate change and is now addicted to lurid headlines and unable to deviate from the universally-agreed narrative: the world is about to end, humanity is to blame and we must stop driving big cars and flying to Spain if the angry gods of global warming are to be placated. To contradict this "inconvenient truth" is to invite condemnation as a climate change denier.
While the Cold War has ended and meaningful political discourse has declined, the human need for enemies and struggle has not gone away, manifesting itself in activist campaigns with nebulous goals such as making poverty history, smashing capitalism or saving the planet.
- Yours, etc,
PHILIP DONNELLY, Donadea, Naas, Co Kildare.