The last week has shown it’s time for action not just talk on climate change

LAST week 150 young people from across the country gathered in the Dáil chamber for the first ever youth assembly on climate change. The event was fitting for two reasons. First, as evidenced so powerfully by the inspirational Greta Thunberg, it is the younger generation that will be most affected by climate change and it is they who are taking the lead in fighting it.

Second, the Dáil gathering came in a week where events across the globe have highlighted – in the starkest possible terms – the real, devastating and lethal impact of climate change.

On the other side of the world massive raging bushfires have devastated swathes of Australia’s eastern seaboard.

The fires – among the worst ever seen in the country – have killed four, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses and, at one point even threatened to engulf the suburbs of Sydney.

To put how just close the blaze came to Sydney into an Irish context it would be the equivalent of a forest fire engulfing Swords in Dublin or Ballincollig in Cork.

Closer to home, in the UK Yorkshire has been submerged by floods that have killed one person, while in Italy two lives were lost in Venice as the historic city experienced its worst floods in fifty years.

These disasters have all received considerable media coverage but, in just the last week, there have been several others you may not be aware of.

In Africa, changes to typical weather patterns in the Indian Ocean have resulted in huge flash floods that have swamped countless villages in Somalia and Sudan. The same unusual weather has led to massive landslides in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania.

Such violent aberrations in the climate around the Indian Ocean typically occur twice every thousand years. They have happened three times in the last decade.

Further east in India itself, another disaster is unfolding in Delhi which is blanketed in a dense smog that is some 400 times the minimum healthy level for air pollution.

Delhi is no stranger to smog but this is the lengthiest and most severe spell the city has experienced in generations. City officials have said the city is like a “gas chamber” and the smog is so thick incoming planes have had to be diverted.

Meanwhile, in China two patients have been diagnosed with Pneumonic Plague, an infection many now believe responsible for many of fatalities during the ‘Black Death’. The cause of the new outbreak has been linked to a huge increase in the rat population as a result of persistent droughts.

Fires, floods, poisonous smog and plague all in a single week and what do they have in common? Every single one has been directly blamed on the impact of climate change.

If that’s not enough to convince sceptics that something needs to be done then it’s hard to imagine what can change their minds.

Until then we’ll have to rely on young people like those in the Dáil last week to keep hammering home the message.

Hopefully their vital message will eventually get through to the politicians who normally fill those seats.