If you’re a coastal Dub doing a Marie Kondo on the shoe cupboard, and you’re thinking of heaving out the Cuban heels and the platform soles, just hang on a minute. Despite their exotic fashion origins, that fancy footwear might have a practical application in the near future.
For according to an authoritative report in last Thursday’s Irish Times here, sea levels in Dublin have been rising at twice the global rate for the past eight decades.
This clearly bothered some readers, so yesterday (Saturday) the paper carried a reassurance from “Dublin City Council’s most senior flooding expert” that Dublin’s flood defences are designed to protect the capital “to the end of the Century”.
But neither report seemed to make anything of the fact that the accumulated Dublin rise of 130ml over the past 20 years, when set against the global average of sea level rise of 70ml, can only mean that the Fair City and its surrounding area is sinking – or subsiding if you prefer - at about 3.5ml per year. For any notion of “localized sea level rises” flies in the face of the fact that water always finds its own level.
“It’s no more than they deserve” is probably the robust response of citizens elsewhere on the island. But for Dubs in the coastal lowlands, it means more than finally learning what the accountancy term Sinking Fund means in all those incomprehensible balance sheets presented at club AGMs.
For the fact is that barometric pressure and regional wind direction can have a very real effect on day-to-day tidal levels, something which is exacerbated at times of extreme high Spring tides with the excessive rains of a period of bad weather
Thus in present circumstances, despite the precautions and defences in place, all that is needed is very low pressure and much rain over Ireland with the cyclonic centre to the westward, a Spring tide imminent, and a prolonged period of southwesterly gales persisting in the Celtic Sea and St George’s Channel to push the surging water towards Dublin Bay to meet the extra rainwater coming down to Dodder, Liffey and Tolka valleys.
Then we’ll really learn about water finding its own level. And maybe we’ll also learn why the Dutch have evolved into being the tallest people in Europe……