Looking backward to see forward: Historical changes of public knowledge about climate hazards in Ireland

Abstract

This paper seeks to prompt climate change researchers and climate hazard managers in Ireland to think expansively about the human potential for adjusting to anticipated climate perturbations in the twenty-first century. It argues that, in the past, shifting and expanding combinations of anthropogenic factors propelled important changes of perception and response to disruptive climate events and it suggests that a thorough canvas of past experience with such transitions has the potential to enrich the existing menu of human choices for the future. Evidence of the expanding gaze of humans on climate hazards is presented from a representative selection of monastic chronologies, letters, diaries and newspapers and the links to policy changes that eventually followed in their wake are noted. At a time when innovations in information technology are redrawing the boundary between climate experts and laypersons, with uncertain but potentially far-reaching consequences, a systematic analysis of historical human responses to disjunctive climate events in Ireland would be a useful tool for broadening the basis of climate decision-making.