February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Suffice it to say, the Irish air conditioning business sector lags behind the likes of central heating and home insulation on an island not noted for predictably warm Junes, Julys, and Augusts. But for how long?
If recent temperatures are a harbinger of predicted climate trends, now might be the time to set up shop and start touting the virtues of central air to the increasingly wealthy denizens of a place that the Romans, perhaps prematurely, dubbed Hibernia the land of eternal winter.
As July reached its zenith, those Irish who hadn’t decamped to more southern latitudes for a sun break found themselves basking in homespun temperatures more typical of southern California, or one of the Spanish costa dels.
As usual, the natives were complaining about the heat after about two days. They might have to get used to it. Like it or not, Ireland is going to become a warmer, cozier little landmass.
And unlike some in politics on this side of the ocean, the inhabitants have little problem in accepting both the scientific and economic realities that will go hand in hand with global warming, Irish style.
Some, indeed, are longing for a few extra degrees with upturned faces and outstretched arms.
The Irish may once have worshipped trees but native forests were felled by history’s twists and turns to the point that the island has a lot of its own version of big sky country. Sometimes it’s even blue.
But back to climate — a Martyn Turner illustration in the Irish Times just before the recent G8 summit in Scotland took a poke at President Bush for his continuing reluctance to embrace global warming as a matter of immediate urgency.
Turner, under a heading “The optically challenged through history,” had Lord Nelson peering through a telescope with his patched, sightless eye while saying: “I see no ships.”
In the next box was Bush looking through a pair of binoculars made from miniature oil barrels while stating: “I see no global warming.”
Now Bush did seem concede at the summit that there would appear to be a growing climate problem, but he firmly restated his long standing view that the Kyoto Protocol — which Ireland has signed but is having a hard time complying with — is not the best way to tackle the problem.
Robert Novak summed it up thus in his syndicated column: “U.S. negotiators insisted on removal from the summit’s communiqu