People buying expensive houses in the Sandymount area of Dublin should be aware that it is vulnerable to rising sea levels as a result of climate change, according to Dr John Sweeney, lecturer in geography at St Patrick's College, Maynooth.
Addressing yesterday's Green Party conference on global warming, Dr Sweeney showed a street map of Sandymount with overlaid contour lines indicating that most of this choice residential area is less than two metres above the existing sea level.
Dr Sweeney noted that Sandymount had a history of flooding and said a further rise in sea levels would be "obviously of concern" because the storm-led ingress of water from Dublin Bay would then probably occur more frequently. He said Ireland would "probably not experience warming at the same rate as anywhere else in the world", due to its proximity to the Atlantic, where heat is effectively "mixed" offshore at great depths.
Dr Sweeney suggested that Ireland's climate would warm by 0.5 Celsius in winter and 1.5 in summer between now and 2050. But the more significant change would be variations in the pattern of rainfall.
Based on computer models, he anticipated that we wound have wetter winters and drier summers, with a 15 per cent reduction in summer rainfall, mostly in the north and east of the country, and a 20 per cent increase in winter rainfall in the north and west.
This would have implications for environmental management. These included a risk of more frequent flooding on certain rivers in the winter as well as dangers that drier summers would reduce the flow of rivers to such an extent that fish life would be threatened.
Prof John FitzGerald, of the ESRI, said that if building standards were changed today to make houses more energy-efficient, it would have a significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 due to the increasing output of new housing.
"We have an opportunity here, unlike the rest of Europe, to change a higher proportion of our dwellings by 2010 because we're building far more, some 40,000 this year, and this is likely to continue."
Prof FitzGerald said Ireland was different to the rest of Europe in that its working-age population was rising "very rapidly", with more people forming households, consuming energy for heating and buying cars.
He suggested that the number of cars in Ireland was likely to rise to the average EU level, "if not higher". This was a factor in the ESRI's projection that carbon dioxide emissions from the transport sector would increase by 115 per cent by 2010.
The introduction of a "proper public transport" system in Dublin would not only help to reduce emissions, which were damaging to the environment, but also traffic congestion, which also damaged the environment.
According to Prof FitzGerald, the most effective way to curb carbon dioxide emissions would be an EU-wide energy tax, which would raise the price of energy with effects similar to the 1970s oil price increases, which made its use much more efficient.
But because of the requirement for unanimity among EU member-states on fiscal matters - something he was "disappointed" the Amsterdam Treaty did not address - there had been no progress so far on the Commission's proposal for a carbon tax.
Prof FitzGerald said the Government's "very dilatory stance" on this issue had resulted in Ireland losing its "green credentials". This meant that even if we did have "special problems", there would be no sympathy for us from other EU member-states.
But even without EU agreement, he said there were "very good reasons" why Ireland should implement a tax on greenhouse gases and use the revenue to reduce taxes on labour. Indeed, the ESRI had shown that this would actually increase employment.
But Ms Rosemary Steen, from IBEC, warned that an energy tax would have a "profoundly negative impact" on the competitiveness of Irish business and could result in the closure of a number of major energy users, with little impact on carbon dioxide emissions.
