“If the Dutch lived in Ireland, they’d feed the world; if the Irish lived in Holland, they’d drown.”
Have you heard this one? How true is it? What is wrong with this country? Every time there is a short, sharp spell of rain, the place fills up to the brim and then floods. What would the Dutch, snug, warm and dry behind their man-made polders, farming their fertile, desalinated land, think of us?
I’m sure every Japp, Johan, Henrik, Thys and Joost are simply laughing their big toothy Dutch grins at the fact that every year the same thing happens and every year the Paddies sink.
The straight-up Dutchmen on their flat, sea-sodden bit of northern Europe are not only prepared – they are thriving. Do you know that the Dutch are the second largest agricultural exporters in the world? Yes, in the world – second only to the Americans. Their land mass is smaller than Munster and they export $70 billion worth of food and we export close to three times less ($25 billion), with three times more land.
It’s worth thinking about.
But enough of this Holland-envy or else the Billies up North will think we are going soft on the eve of our big centenary. Let’s instead think about the gift mother nature has bestowed on the Gaels by virtue of being stuck up here in the north Atlantic.
In the decades ahead, global warming is going to make this a very attractive place to live. While global warming might give us a bit more rain and may cause the seas to swell, the Gael may well get lucky.
Global warming is a man-made catastrophe and it is going to affect the hot, densely populated and already dry regions much more than it will us. In fact, while Miami and Bangladesh may disappear, we might end up in the finest piece of real estate on the globe.
The weather has always had enormous influence on economics and ultimately on human destiny – and humans have regularly thought that we don’t need to be aware of the sensitive ecosystem that is the earth. History is full of such hubris.
Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was in Honduras while filming a documentary for Australian TV. I headed to Copan, one of the finest examples of Mayan civilisation, which disappeared overnight.
Amazingly, this hidden city in the jungle was discovered in 1834 by an Irish bloke called John Gallagher. He was fighting as a mercenary for the Honduran independence movement. In the early part of the 19th century, Latin America was full of Irish adventurers; many fought in the Latin American wars for independence and most of them stayed on (if you are interested in this fascinating part of our history, visit irlandeses.org)
Gallagher was one such privateer, fighting in Central America. He was posted with a raggle-taggle regiment to the far north-west of this beautiful country. When he heard the locals talking about the lost city in the jungle, he decided to find out what they were talking about, probably in the hope of finding the buried treasure of the ancient civilisation, the Mayans.
Instead of gold, Gallagher discovered, deep in the rainforest, the most striking city-state of the Mayans. It was almost totally preserved and was the capital of the southern part of the vast, pre-Colombian Maya empire. Gallagher was spellbound by what he saw – the huge pyramids, the enormous acropolis and no fewer than 28 palaces – all hidden deep in the jungle. In 1835, he began telling the world about his vast discovery.
The story of the lost cities in the jungle, which had sustained the Spaniard conquistadors for centuries, grabbed the public imagination.
Gallagher, hardly heard of in his own country, became a hero in Central America, and he is the only non-Mayan to be buried in the city-state and the first to be buried there since the day when the people rose up, burned their own kings and evacuated the great Mayan cities, leaving them to the jungle.
The collapse of the Mayan civilisation has fascinated scholars for years. Why did this vast empire disappear? When I was there, looking at the distinctly Mongol faces of the kings and their ornate statues adorned with hieroglyphics, the question begged: what happened?
This society was the most advanced in the world 1,100 years ago. The Mayans possessed knowledge of mathematics and astronomy far surpassing anything in Europe’s Dark Ages at the time. Their farming methods could sustain much larger urban populations than we could, despite the fact that they did not locate their cities beside freshwater. Their systems of canals and storage allowed them to feed huge populations relying on rainwater alone.
For example, Copan in Honduras had an urban population of 27,000 in the seventh century, when most major European centres hadn’t even been founded. Whatever cities we had contained populations that were fractions of the size of the Mayan metropolises.
Their alphabet was phonetic, and their system of trade linked an empire that stretched more than 1,000 miles over what is now Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala. They had created an intricate financial system based on the valuable feathers of the wonderfully colourful macaw. The hieroglyphics tell of this system being abandoned during the decline.
This empire lasted for more than 1,000 years and thrived, peerlessly, for 500 years. Then it disappeared.
The last that was seen of the Mayan kings and temples was a huge pyre, upon which the peasants burned the noblemen because they believed that the noblemen and priests could no longer hold any sway over the gods. How could they, when children were starving?
The Mayans simply ran out of resources. They cut down all the trees to transport rocks from the quarries to make their ornate temples.
Competing nobility, with each chief trying to show he was the biggest, got involved in what could only be described as an arms race to build the most splendid palace. This involved huge amounts of labour, which were taken from the farms and massively reduced the number of farmers available to keep their agriculture going.
They also cut down huge amounts of wood, causing massive soil erosion and flooding. The mad dash to build the most ornate palace used up enormous quantities of materials. To support this madness, the cities needed to produce enormous amounts of food and water, and they needed to pay for it.
In the end, mother nature struck back violently and definitively. The Mayans’ soil turned fallow and they couldn’t support themselves. Over-consumption killed them.
Ancient Copan is a microcosm of what is happening now with global warming. We are destroying the planet by using up its finite resources for our own gratification, and the place is heating up.
But think about this from the Paddy point of view.
When the world heats up and people move to avoid ecological catastrophe, who will win? The winners will be countries that are already temperate, with lots of freshwater, where the population is small and the land fertile and empty. Being an island helps too. Guess where fits that description?
If we figure out polders or import a few Joosts, Johans and Japps to keep us warm and dry, Ireland could reap a massive ecological harvest. It’s not that I don’t care about the planet, I do, but there will be winners and losers and we may be winners.
That wouldn’t be a bad result, would it?
Subscribe.
David, if this wasn’t in the same week when ‘cute hoorism’ was shown to be rife in politics I might have some belief. Lets be clear, the Mayans died because of overconsumption. Ireland agriculture is the biggest emitter.. and recent events in the IFA show there’s cute hoorism there too. As a global population if we all lived like Paddy, then we’d need three planets – that’s how wasteful we are. The world passes resource overshoot earlier every year- we’re now passing it in August. The Story of Stuff is well worth a look. We’re in for some interesting times,… Read more »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QowL2BiGK7o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvCUWK9X8ro
The Dutch were an imperial power and have no problem with exploiting poorer countries. They and the Chinese are raping the fertile lands of Africa, harvesting multiple crops each year without allowing any rest or adding any form of replenishment. When the fertility runs out, they’re away leaving nothing but a desert for the locals. I wouldn’t use the Dutch as a standard for agricultural production. Most of the food produced in Holland,is forced and is tasteless – it’s almost synthetic. On climate change – whether we like it or not, nuclear power is going to be the answer. All… Read more »
Hi,
An excellent an thought provoking article. Its like tony brogan wrote it. Tony and Adam Live on small islands David.
On a technical note the dutch are a nation of market Gardner’s. We are farmers; grain, beef, milk.
Three things fucked the mayans;
Lackmof morals, vanity and greed.
As with Easter Island, I’ve often wondered what the last person to leave thought, as they were packing up. Probably something rather prosaic, such as ‘shame all the shops are shut’.
One year there were 27,000 people partying like it was 1999, and the next is was almost quiet. Just as in nature, social things don’t tend to happen slowly – they don’t happen at all, and then all at once. Like wars. One day there’s state backed terrorism, the next there’s a war.
Theres always a kind of anti_Irish rhetoric behind that Dutch phrase. I don’t think you could replace Irish with Nigerians and get away with it. In any case the two are not comparable, the dutch are protecting themselves from the sea while Ireland gets a lot or rain, land gets water logged, and rivers flood, something that happens anywhere there is an extraordinary amount of rain. Like Cumbria. Or China. Or anywhere with rain over the norm. Neither the easter Island or the Mayans can tell us too much about global economies, you could argue that they died out because… Read more »
The Dutch agricultural system is much more intensive for total green house gases. The Nitrogen for N fertilizer is produced by cracking natural gas and 8% of global natural gas is used to manufacture N fertiliser producing 3,6 kg CO2 eqv per kg nitrogen (a significant of Irelands Kinsale gas was used to produce fertiliser), N20 Nitrogen Oxide is produced when N fertilisers and spread on the land and is 300 times as powerful in contributing to global warming as CO2. Methane gas generated by the livestock industry worldwide, Methane is 23 times more potent than CO2 and traps up… Read more »
“Global warming is a man-made catastrophe” – rather ‘accelerated’ (disproportionately) by man – otherwise naturally occurring! Anthropogenic activity accounts for ~ (only) 3% of all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Just sayin!
The Paddies have exploited the benefits of global warming for a long time and without its effects we wouldn’t be living here.We’d be freezing our arses off under a glacier. An Ice shelf covered most of Ireland 20,000 years ago and the only fertile part of the Island covered a line south from Wexford to Kerry.Our Northern chums would have had to content themselves with ice skating rather than marching down the Queen’s highway. The question is how do continue to exploit our vast resources for our benefit rather than just hand them over to global corporations? Drilling was recently… Read more »
Only problem David is a lot of that “Land” is flooded at the moment. Which leads me nicely into flood prevention and flood relief. The two are not the same although they are linked. The solution in coastal ares is usually flood defence ie prevention. The solution for the Shannon is much more likely to require flood relief with some prevention. Essentially the Shannon needs a bypass route from “somewhere” above Lough Derg to the Shannon Estuary “somewhere” below Limerick, where the estuary starts to widen. So imagine a 50 mile (I’m guessing, I haven’t done my homework, I’m not… Read more »
Global Warming is a Sham. Bogus. There is no such thing. You will look back in 15 years and say, fuck, nothing has changed except Im not aloud to have my fire or stove anymore and there will not be any birds as they will have been chopped up like chicken liver from the windmills that will blight the lanscape of the country north to south. Your ESB bill will be out of sight, those electric cars will have you broke. Remember peak oil?????Dont be so fucking stupid please. All made up scaremonger bullshit backed by junk science. What a… Read more »
Oil below $35!! Wake the fuck up.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-prices-still-under-pressure-wti-falls-below-35-1450094180
All very well if you buy into the latest religion of climate change and global warming.I remember growing up int he 1870s being assured by the alarmists that by now Ireland would be under 50 foot of ice and glaciers would be covering Dublin. Then in the 1980s it was Acid rain burning us all and turning Europe into a barren desert. Then in 2005 with the biggest profiteer of Climate change and major carbon footprint man Al G[B]ore assuring us that we would be growing grapes in Munster and paddling gondolas around Dublin while paying 15usd per gallon of… Read more »
Regarding current oil prices we are living in the eye of the storm. Oil companies are not making money, they are taking production off line, laying off people and cancelling investment in exploration. When or If global growth increases significantly, demand will increase so there will be a supply shortage, prices will increase dramatically, (similar to the current state of the Irish housing market). Supply will take time to increase, and this will blow the debt bubble.
DAVID. HOW ABOUT ICE AGE IN 2030?
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/13/mini-ice-age-earth-
sunspots
IT IS OUR SUN AGAIN!
.
.
=> RESPONSIBLE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS
-> MORE CO2 = MORE LIFE
-> WE ARE CARBON LIFE FORMS?
http://www.livescience.com/44330-jurassic-dinosaur-carbon-dioxide.html
HA.
-> DONT LET THAT STOP THE GRAVY TRAIN !
Global warming is definitely happening and human caused, though.
A propos what would have happened had the Dutch the Dutch left an imprint on the Irish agriculture, this might be of interest to some (how Dutch immigrants to Poland influenced Polish agriculture). http://www.polenvoornederlanders.nl/?page_id=5127&lang=en One correction – the website says “Unfortunately, they didn’t leave any monuments of the literature” – but there is one village in Poland where the locals cultivate the very old version of Dutch and I think they might have some poetry in that language. As a historical curiosity, the Poles under the command of gen. Maczek liberated the Dutch town of Breda with a successful outflanking… Read more »
Interesting article David, though it’s sad to see the number of commentators who still cannot take well-established science on board. I doubt if there will be any winners on this issue in the long term. Such talk ignores the global scale of the problem. For example, we can expect migration of whole nations that will have to be accommodated by regions not affected by flooding or drought. We have recently seen the global effect of regional instability in one or two nations – image what that will be like for a whole continent. There is also the problem of a… Read more »
What the opening section of this article highlights is the pointlessness of two Irish Public bodies; Enterprise Ireland and Irish Water. These are examples non-productive, not fit for purpose public sector entities. Enterprise Ireland and Irish Water are set up for supposedly political or economic reasons but mainly exist just to forward their own interests and the salaries of the people employed there, nothing more and nothing less. Irish Water. The exercise in pointless double taxation, rent seeking in effect, that Irish Water is should be blindingly obvious to anybody who walks outside this front door at the moment, or… Read more »
Padser, Irish PI, Smokey and Goldbug (I always think Goldbug is a sideline of Tony’s for some reason, y’know, because of the gold), they have got this right. As far as I can tell, and I have to say it is pretty clear, the whole thing is yet another mass delusion. The leading player in this is the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which is yet another blessing given to us by the UN. Reading about them in Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster and on Donna Laframboise’s blog. In a recent post, for example, Laframboise (a Canadian)… Read more »
I know we are all into our conspiracy theories, most of which are based on greed. There is no doubt that Global Warming is a fact. If you disagree with that statement then you are not living on this planet. We are all well aware that global warming is a license for the unscrupulous to entertain our conspiracies. David’s article is about the natural winners and losers in this scenario. So perhaps that’s where some of you great minds (I say that with sincerity) might direct your attention. One thing is for sure, if you don’t bring that mental fire… Read more »
The price of oil is an interesting one. Something perhaps David could do an update on for us. The current price $40 (approx), as has been pointed out, is not sustainable. Neither is a price much above $60. So the new normal range for oil prices is probably somewhere between $50 and $60. That is a far cry from the Lehman’s manipulated $120 peak. The issue for oil producers is not peak oil, it’s peak demand. Peak demand for oil has been reached and demand will decline. And that is both good and bad for the Global Warming problem. Very… Read more »
“If the Dutch lived in Ireland, they’d feed the world; if the Irish lived in Holland, they’d drown.”
If I were a bar of chocolate, I’d eat myself.
The Dutch don’t live in Ireland. What they did do to us is give us William Of Orange, however.
Excuse me, there have been warming periods, cooling periods for thousands of years, and all of them before man burned fossil fuels. Its a sham, it doesnt exist and the sooner you realize that the mean average of rainfall, floods, fires and “weather events” is just about average, the sooner you will wake up to the the charlatans like Boner who are laughing at you for being a moron. Wake up. Peaks and valleys. Warmer, cooler, wetter, drier. Fuck me, Global Warming. Ha ha ha. Fuck off.
David, fully agree. You are a well travelled man – only through traveling around the world you can understand the situation as it is. You talk to many people and their experiences. I can say that I’ve lived and worked in many continents and cultures and have come to the same conclusion many years ago when I met a couple of Indonesian students in their early 20s. They live in Bandung on the Indonesian island of Java. They said it wasn’t that hot when they were younger and they struggle every day to cope with the heat. Can you imagine… Read more »
It will help if the town planning department of this country are more informed about our world. It will help if they read up what is going on with our environment, our new way of living in houses, our need to have daylight. It will help if common sense is a simple attribute to implement in their regulations. It to will help if the planning department understand that we are now l living in the modern age. In fact for the last 20 years or so. It will help if the planning department use an ordinary paper calendar on their… Read more »
Ex Pat Northener Reply here to your post above. ‘It cuts both ways’ Which means? AGW is either true or it’s not. I notice that you have addressed none of my points. There are seven of them. Go on, have a go. There’s more where they came from when you have finished. This guest post on Watts Up With That? gives an opinion of Skeptical Science. I don’t read these blogs much as it would be a full time job trying to cover anything. However, every now and then I go into greater detail on one particular thing just to… Read more »
The 26 counties can’t cope with > 3.5 million people. Recession, emigration, housing boom, flooding follow each other in a continual loop. 55 million people live in England with a land mass just 50% more.
Summary.
Ireland’s winters are going to continue to be wetter than heretofore.
Therefore regardless of the cause of Global Warming we have to deal with it’s effects.
The introduction of re-newables is a good thing which has nothing to do with Global Warm. It introduces competition into the energy market.
And it improves security of supply.
JFDI.
Seems the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 19 years. That is why they changed the name of the scam from global warming to climate change. Many scientists now forecasting a cooling period next. Nobody really knows except that the climate has always changed and always will. The fact that climate credits were invented by Goldman Suchs leads me to the conclusion that this is another elite scam invented by one of their many think tanks the Club of Rome. Google it up lots of the usual suspects who want to reduce the human population such as Prince Philip.… Read more »
The Dutch benefit from agricultural subsidies also. That being said, they are not living off subsidies in terms of horticultural production. There is no comparison with NI and the NL. Agriculture in Ireland, is banjaxed by a certain industry model. It consists of one large player, dominating an industry and sucking the profit margins out of everybody else. It applies also in beer/ale production, in the print media, in cement production. Until recently, it was the case with whiskey production, resulting in massive underperformance in Ireland compared with Scotland, Kentucky/Tennessee, and even Japan. And in banking, there were two firms… Read more »
I was a believer in Global Warming. Then the three hard winters occurred. And this was repeated simultaneously in North America, and Asia, at the same time. I would consider myself to be somebody who keeps an open mind on the matter. Everytime, I hear Eamon Ryan (the liar who promised to sort of the Rossport debacle, and who bailed out the banks) going into hysterics on the media, I get very sceptical about the entire thing. It is probably because he has already been caught out to be lying so many times before. I simply cannot take him seriously.… Read more »
If the current demographic trend continues in the Atlantic counties of Ireland, then there will be no need for any concern concerning carbon emissions.
It will all be one large forest, with no people under 60, few cars, and no economic activity.
Loads of superficial tax clearing houses will be able to use it as a means of boosting their green credentials. And the Irish people can be removed out of their way.
FG will be able to proclaim the entire project a “success”.
The farmers can claim that the farm animals are producing food.
What are the yummy mummies in Terenure tractos producing ?
From my observations, they are producing brats who cannot pronounce the letter “r” properly, and whose career ambitions amount to living off the state, via a role in the institutional complex that predominates south county Dublin.
Give me a 12 inch pizza, anyday !!
This is purely a competition for,access to and control of resources on a local and global level.The climate change and global warming arguments are bogus. Business wants control over resources make a buck, politicians want to tax them because that’s the nature of parasites. Fortunately we’ve won on the global level because we’re in a part of the world that will do very nicely. Switzerland has mountains to keep the third world at bay.We have the sea. I had a walk around the city centre having listened to the discussion at the hist David.A really nice bunch of clued-in kids… Read more »
About the Shannon, what I don’t understand is who in the ESB makes the decision to open the safety valve and let water escape down the old course of the river. I’d also like to know if there any dangling strings available for politicians, perhaps local ones in Clare and Limerick, to pull on. Last time, in 2009, memory tells me that the flood on the Strand in Athlone only receded after the gates were opened at Parteen Weir. Why do they wait so long before doing this? Why don’t they release water in anticipation of a storm? I assumed… Read more »
Mike Lucey
It’s obviously still in development Mike but it seems several sizes too small for most Irish politicians.
Global Warming or Climate Change. The consequences are the same. And there you have it. The consequences. Does anyone actually know with any certainty what the consequences will be. Take Ireland for example. We are “promised” warmer and wetter winters and guess what more flooding. BUT it has also been suggested that the gulf stream which gives us our temperate climate could be shut off or even just abated by GW. If that happens our winters will be colder and dryer. A few items of interest maybe. The angle of tilt of the earths axis changes cyclically over a 41,000… Read more »
I think the whole debate needs to be re-framed. The word ‘pollution’ only gets one mention on this page – David’s article – plus 109 comments so far. Likewise on the Telegraph article that coldblow posted – only one mention of the word pollution by a commenter at the bottom of the page (both posters invoke the severe pollution in Beijing, China, as it happens). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/paris-climate-change-conference/12025836/Paris-climate-conference-10-reasons-why-we-shouldnt-worry-about-man-made-global-warming.html We may or may not agree that ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ do or do not exist. But who wants to live next door to a neighbour burning coal all day or dumping mixed… Read more »
Ex Pat Northerner I said above that you are wasting my time trying to convince me with your arguments. Well, you really are wasting my time. I looked up Murdoch first and got a stock article from the Guardian about how alarming it is that he is not a scientists and ‘doesn’t understand’. Then I looked up National Geographic from your list of AGW ‘deniers’. The very *first* one was National Geographic as it didn’t seem the kind of publication that would go against the fashionable grain. I searced for National Georgraphic Global Warming and got this: http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/ The first… Read more »
Ex Pat Northerner More on your last post. ‘You do know that Anthony Watts gets funding from the Heartland Institute and has no formal scientific background.’ Who are Heartland? Why should I care if he got funding from them? Wiki calls it ‘the primary American supporter of climate change denial.’ (There’s that word again.) Wiki is biased of course, but even so what is the problem? AGW denier is funded by AGW denying body. Now, what exactly is this funding? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/some-notes-on-the-heartland-leak/ ‘They do not regularly fund me or my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind.’… Read more »
Ex Pat Northerner “The science is largely settled among the scientists”. I beg to differ.Science can never be settled among scientists or anyone else.That’s what defines it as science and not faith I would suggest. Science is only consensus based on the available evidence until new evidence emerges to change that consensus. In the 1950’s scientists thought it safe for workers to sweep up radiactive waste in nuclear facilities with sweeping brushes without wearing protective equipment. In the 1960’s scientists produced reams of “evidence” that thalidomide was a safe product. The list goes on. Science is not infallible and it”s… Read more »
Ex Pat Just finishing your list of media publications or broadcasters who you claim are biased against AGW. Washington Post Google search: washington post global warming From first page: this-is-what-happens-when-the-arctic-warms-twice-as-fast-as-the-rest-of-the-planet ‘For a second straight year, the Arctic is warming faster than any other place in the world, and walrus populations… are thinning along with the ice sheets’ It goes on to quote NOAA chief scientist Richard Spinrad. I understand that NOAA are behind controversial attempts to overstate temperatures and are in the warmist camp. Sky News Google search: sky news global warming First headings thown up by search: Global Warming… Read more »
Keeping interest rates up with global warming. Anthropomorphic Global Warming is a paper chase to keep us occupied while the real issues go unattended. This is David dangling us on a string, while we blow in the wind. Contamination by the myriad number of chemicals infused into our daily lives is not mentioned. How about plastics, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc is not mentioned other than by a couple of enlightened souls. For an intelligent man the statements from David re the causes of global climate change are a disgrace. I have read books on climate, geology and the changing shape… Read more »
Since when does “three times less” mean one-third?
Next thing you’ll be spelling MC as “emcee”.
Coldblow. you are quite right the operating levels in the Shannon need to be reviewed on a regular basis, say every 10 years. For example what impact has the removal of a large amount of peat had on the Shannon. Those peat bogs acted as huge sponges in the past. And that’s just one of the more obviously changes that have occurred since the Ardnacrusha dam was built over 80? years ago. The only issue is whose responsibility is it to do the new surveys and set new target levels (if required) or confirm the existing tarbets levels. And perhaps… Read more »