“On a personal level, it is normal now to see men wearing shorts in Winter time”
Can any change including climate change be stopped? Around 500BC Heraclitus, the philosopher, claimed that "Permanence is an illusion as all things are in perpetual flux". However, if we were to fully accept this dictum all forms of recklessness may become accepted but we must agree that change cannot be halted. Caithfimid glacadh leis.
In my life time, I have noticed many differences as a result of what we call climate change which comes from meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years.
We have two references which tend to overlap here: generally when we talk of climate change it tends to really mean global warming on a local level. Our capacity to control the climate is limited to the calculated aspect of certain human behaviours which impact on global warming. Did human behaviour influence the Ice Age, the Big Wind 1839 or the Beast from the East 2018?
An old name for Ireland is Hibernia- this came from the Romans and means, reputedly, "Land of Winter" as the weather was so bad during their brief visit here but the name refers to a time around 2000 years ago! Periods of bad weather are not new to this place so when we speak of perspective we need to take the longest possible time frame.
The sheer volume of wind we now experience is considerable: look at old aerial photos of farmyards and see how poorly secured silage coverings were. On a personal level, it is normal now to see men wearing in shorts in Winter time—that was not the case some decades ago and drought can now happen in any season. Locally, nature has responded to climate change: we won and lost.
The curlew is rare like the lapwing, I have not seen a cuckoo in years but we gained the egret and the hoopoe.
The scale of whale sightings is remarkable and the wild fuchsia is now more widespread whilst whortleberries are virtually extinct. In olden times, dates were set for each farm corn-threshing many weeks in advance and I cannot remember any changes having to be made due to rainfall- that procedure could not happen today.