Latest / Blind Guys Chat / #140: Larry's favourite guest

Transcript

#140: Larry's favourite guest · Blind Guys Chat

• 0:13
  Welcome to blind guys chat, where this guy, oren o'. Neill.
• 0:17
  Hello.
• 0:18
  And this guy, yan bloom.
• 0:21
  Hello.
• 0:21
  And mohammed lasheer.
• 0:23
  Hi there.
• 0:23
  Talk about the a to z of life.
• 0:30
  Well, hello, ladies and gentlemen, and you are very welcome to episode 140. Now, breaking tradition, we are going straight to our guest who has just flown. Literally not flown, no. He's been in his Tesla. He's come from all the way from the northwest of Ireland, and he has landed in his house and he is connected with us to talk about all things weather related. And I have to say I wanted. I wanted to get our guests on for quite some time. But first of all, disclaimer Larry, who you all know my favorite guide dog.
• 1:07
  Happens to be.
• 1:09
  Once this man walks into Larry's life.
• 1:11
  Yeah.
• 1:12
  All bets are off. Yep, he loves them because Professor John Sweeney from Mayooth College, Larry is in love with him.
• 1:21
  Really?
• 1:22
  Absolutely loves him.
• 1:23
  Party about him.
• 1:24
  Yeah, absolutely. Party. But the other reason I wanted to make sure. And John, I want to make sure that I did this was to call you Professor John Sweeney, which is your correct title, if I'm correct. Because what's been annoying me on certainly on the radio in the last few months is for Professor John Sweeney to be introduced as Climatologist John Sweeney without his title. And on your behalf, John, I have been enraged.
• 1:58
  Because you deserve your honorific. In fairness, you earned it.
• 2:01
  Okay.
• 2:02
  Don't worry about it, Oren. I'm called a lot worse from closer sources than the radio, I should add.
• 2:14
  Talking about humor, you know, well done.
• 2:18
  Welcome. You're very welcome. You must be tired of talking about the weather now because just to inform our audience who don't know, we have been in Ireland besieged by rain over the last couple of weeks, and particularly last week, there were floods in areas of Ireland that haven't seen flooding in years.
• 2:41
  Actually, Oren, the same has been going on in Morocco and the south of Europe in the Iberian Peninsula, but Morocco especially as well. Really, where there's been so much rain after eight years of droughts flooded the whole country. There's water everywhere and it comes out of the weirdest places now. So the weather is definitely weird in more places than just Ireland.
• 3:01
  Wow.
• 3:02
  For sure.
• 3:03
  Well, we're talking. We've got the right man on the show then.
• 3:07
  Yeah, we do.
• 3:08
  Just turn me.
• 3:09
  And please keep in mind, we have a zipline. We have a zip line, you know, to the Netherlands, too. You can always come to my place.
• 3:15
  You know, it's. It's very dry.
• 3:18
  We are under sea water. Level.
• 3:20
  But.
• 3:21
  But it's still dry. Yeah, yeah, still dry.
• 3:24
  The last time I mentioned John, he had been talking to me. No, I don't think you've been. I've been talking to your wife, John. And at that stage you were at, I think you were at cop. What was the level cough? 30. And you had set fire. No, sorry, you hadn't set fire to the Italian Pavilion there because they wouldn't give you any gelato. But you had mentioned. No, was it? You had mentioned. Maybe it was on the last podcast or your wife did say to me, as the temperature of the sea between. I think it was somewhere between, let's say the Bahamas might be wrong and Africa was at a ridiculously high like 26 degrees or something like that.
• 4:09
  Wow.
• 4:10
  Yeah, I think that was round about the time of Hurricane Melissa as well. And you know the conditions when you get above 26 degrees, you're really into hurricane forming conditions where the heat of the sea simply spirals the air above it into cyclonic storms very much more easily. We had a marine heat wave I think around that time, certainly in Brazil it was 32 degrees every day. But you had a burst of thunderstorm activity in the afternoon almost every day as well. But it was part and parcel of what we've been doing to the atmosphere and it wasn't unexpected. Although when you get an extreme event, it seems to hit people as something that, oh, we've never had this before, what's going on. Whereas, you know, for climate people, it's the kind of thing we've been warning about for a long, long time. In the case of Ireland, I know that I did the original scenario modeling for Irish climate way back in 2003 and this was the first time that people produced maps of what was going to on a relatively small scale in Ireland. And our big conclusion then was, oh, it's going to get wetter in the winter, we're going to have more intense rainfall in the winter, we're going to have more droughts in the summer. And you know, everything since then has kind of verified that, but people have simply not taken notice and prepared for what's coming down the line. And that's been a bit of a frustration for anybody connected with, with climate science because unless you start taking this seriously and preparing for it, you're going to end up with these kinds of catastrophic events that we've seen in Ireland and indeed in Morocco over the past while. And in the past they tend to get accentuated by short term meteorological conditions and you may Remember, the really cold weather they were having in North America got down to almost 20. Well, that kind of cold weather contrasted extremely sharply with the hot tropical weather over Mexico and the Caribbean that you mentioned. And that drove a really strong jet stream across the Atlantic. And at the moment that's tearing into the Iberian Peninsula and into Morocco. And along the way, that really strong jet stream accentuates storms. It. It builds them into greater, quicker cyclonic bombs, as we might call them, which are very hard to predict where they end up. And that's part of the story. I really think that the floods in southern Spain and Morocco are really so unusual because they are part of the driest areas in Europe and North Africa at the moment. But here in Ireland, well, it's been driving the air up from the Bay of Biscay into the Irish Sea. It's been doing the same as the. For Jan in Holland. And we've been getting double our average monthly rainfall in January in all of those places. And extreme rainfall events which have led to the flooding that we've seen here in Ireland. And, you know, there's an unusual element to what we've been seeing in Ireland here because it's been in the southeast, which is usually the place that escapes the worst of the weather in Ireland, it's usually the west that gets the extreme Atlantic storms. But when you get to the southeast, there's another complication which people really, I don't think have fully grasped yet. And that is that the rivers that drain into the Irish Sea and into the Celtic Sea, they form in the Wicklow Mountains for the most part. But they also are what we call drowned river valleys, because these are valleys that have been flooded by the sea level rise that has occurred since the last glaciation. So it means that the tide goes away up those rivers. In the case of Scarthy, the place that was most severely flooded, the tide goes up 88km inland, and that's a long way from the sea. So you get this tidal surge which stops the rivers from getting out as well if it all happens at the wrong time. And that's what accentuates some of the extreme events we've been seeing, where the scenes have been tragic. I mean, I spoke to a guy who had a lovely riverside restaurant and bed and breakfast in Craigna Manor. He's been flooded nine times in the past decade, and each time, you know, his business is almost wiped out. And of course, you can't get flood insurance when that happens either. So it's extremely hard. But had those suppose warnings from 20 years ago been acted on. Then we could have put in place a lot more in the way of flood defenses for the big towns and cities.
• 9:24
  So this kind of goes to what I was hearing from you on the radio. And I think this, it's why you've been on the radio and on the media so much. You said two things that sounded pretty logical. The first thing was that the government seemed to want to blame the meteorological department because they didn't give enough warnings earlier on, which is untrue, more or less, and everybody has agreed to that. And the second thing was that you had made the point, you were making the point on one of the radio stations is that the floodplains should perhaps be much higher and perhaps farmers should be paid to allow their land, their land on high ground to flood so that it may eliminate, or not completely eliminate, but reduce the amount of flooding that's further down downstream. Have I got that right, John?
• 10:23
  You have. That's your belief. Yeah. And you know, there's two elements there, I think, that are important. The first is that politicians always look to scapegoat something or somebody. And in this case, you know, they're blaming Metair and the meteorological service, who have a responsibility to forecast rainfall but don't really get into the antecedent conditions. For example, the fact that the ground is already saturated means that rainfall suddenly becomes a much more hazardous event. They are not responsible for flood protection, which is the Office of Public Works. So there is a kind of lack of joined up thinking here going on, there's no doubt about it. But you know, the scapegoats have now ext to the freshwater pearl mussel, for example. They are the latest scapegoats because the need to protect those last remaining few freshwater pearl mussels in our rivers, which have been there since the end of the Ice Age and are nearly extinct at this stage, is being used as an excuse to hold up flood protection measures which the engineers think can be done otherwise. And of course, the final scapegoat, the public, you know, it's these nasty people who object or who make representations to flood protection schemes. And some of those representations actually are very sensible representations, but they are being cast as the, I suppose, the villains of the peace who want to defy the common good for the rest of society. So that's the first theme, the second theme, and it's why I'm really keen to talk to Jan today.
• 12:12
  And Mo is also in the Netherlands.
• 12:15
  Oh, is he? Oh, great.
• 12:17
  He's as much to Blame.
• 12:18
  Yes.
• 12:23
  Calm down already, Calm down.
• 12:27
  You have a lovely scheme in the Netherlands called Room for the River. Oh yes, and Room for the river is the model that I think we should be adopting here. And I was thinking, dying to hear a little bit about it from you because it seems to me that here you have a very low lying country. You've always been worried about sea level floods in the delta. In the delta. But now I think the main worry in the past decade has come from the great rivers of the Rhine and the Meuse and so on. And you seem to have coped with that by means of sensible nature based planning rather than huge swathes of concrete all the way down those river channels.
• 13:07
  Yeah. I think Moog can tell it from his own experience. You are living quite close to the, to the rivers.
• 13:14
  I, I live quite close to the rivers, yes. I can't say from my experience because I've been living here for three years, but this scheme that the professor is talking about is actually 30 odd years old. I think 32 or 33 maybe 1993 possibly. But there were big, big, big floods here in the Netherlands back then. The rivers overflowed quite heavily and the damage was massive. And the Dutch are really used to, when such an event happens, they're really used to just taking stock, seeing what the best plan is to avoid something like this happening again and then taking action. I mean it doesn't always happen. We've got a huge nitrogen problem here in the Netherlands and there's a massive political fight going on about that, about who's allowed to basically let nitrogen come down in nature and who's not allowed and who's doing it more, who's not doing it more. So we're not immune to political infighting and nasty battles. But in terms of water, actually the Netherlands did it twice. Where the first time was after a flood in 53 when they built all, built all the big waterworks in the south delta.
• 14:24
  Yeah.
• 14:24
  In the, in the southwest of the country. And then again in 93, 95 when there were massive floods from the rivers and we, we created this Room for the Rivers project which essentially is just creating floodplains.
• 14:40
  Yeah.
• 14:41
  With. Behind them basically just, I think in English you call them dikes where you can. The river, normally the dike is a little bit of ways off from the river and then the river has room to flood the floodplains between the dike and the river proper. And so that allows the river to get quite high, the water to get quite high before it actually becomes a Problem for people that live in. In their homes within that floodplain. You also cannot get flood insurance. I'm not sure. Maybe you are allowed to build there actually, but I'm not sure. But flood anymore? I think basically just a no go. Well, maybe not anymore. Yeah. So flood insurance is just a no go. You'll never get it. You need to build behind the dikes. That's all right, but not in front of them. And those plains are basically room for the rivers. And I think the farmers use them as well when they're not flooded.
• 15:38
  That's exactly what I think we should be doing here, Mo. I've been advocating that for the past week, that we should. Even if we have to pay the farmers to allow their fields to flood for a few weeks in winter, it doesn't destroy their productivity overall because there's not much growing this time of the year anyway. But it would at least slow down the flow of the river sufficiently so that you could actually protect the high value land in the towns and cities downstream for a relatively small cost compared to building huge concrete infrastructure which may well protect a town, but then simply transfers the flood peak downstream to the next town. And that's the difficulty that I think engineers sometimes see the solution as solving it in one place without actually considering the wider ramifications. Yes, we've had some success stories with hard engineering in places like Clonmel, for example, but in general we should look at more radical solutions along the lines that Mo is describing there. Because first of all, it's cheaper. Secondly, of course it allows the river to do what rivers do naturally, which is flood. And you will not never stop a river flooding.
• 17:01
  Also. And you know, every advantage has disadvantage. Especially here in the Netherlands we have a shortage of space for building houses. So that is also there always people like to build houses close to the. Close to river. So that was always a little bit an issue. But also we have now sometimes an overwhelming amount of water, what you now experience and also do. But in the summertime we get also. And we were already warned by the. Perhaps you heard it as well, Mo, by the water association in the south, in North Brabant, that they were expecting a very dry spring and that they were warning to keep all the water. What you have now.
• 17:53
  Conserve.
• 17:53
  Conserve.
• 17:54
  Yeah, yeah. To conserve the water. And that is something. Hey, you need. And you need to get rid of the water sometimes by getting. Yeah. Give the. The room for the, for the river. But sometimes you need to have also. Yeah. To conserve water. That's a nice word by the way. Yeah, to conserve water by. Yeah, also that you allow water to. To be kept for the time that you need it for the farms and for. Also. Yeah, for the. Yeah, the. For to create. Drink water.
• 18:27
  That is actually the newest water management discussion that's going on right now. Because the Dutch are, of course, we are very used to getting rid of water as soon as it falls down. Basically, that's what we've done over the last centuries. But now the climate is getting a little bit less predictable. The weather is getting a little bit less predictable and so we get long dry spells. So the next, the next thing that people are proposing is actually to allow water to seep into farmers fields, which means that they can't get onto their fields with heavy machinery in the winter, but that'd be all right because they can in the spring and in the summer. And that means that the water gets. Gets a chance to seep into the ground so that we could allow our water levels in the ground, the groundwater levels to rise a little bit. So that's the next water discussion that Jon is referring to.
• 19:17
  But you're thinking about the future very positively, which I don't think we are here yet. I think we are reacting to the last event here and after a few weeks we forget the last event very quickly.
• 19:30
  There's no forward planning or thinking at all.
• 19:33
  Well, not that you would like to see. I mean, the latest debate at the moment here is a complaint about flood warning systems. How do you alert people downstream that their town or city is going to be subject to a high flooding risk? And we've never really gone in for that again. We have a meteorological service that says we're going to get a lot of rain, but we don't connect that to our river monitoring network. We have about a thousand real time monitors on our rivers and you can log in and see what the height of the river is, but it won't tell you whether it's rising or falling or where the critical threshold is that you have to get worried about downstream. And also, of course, it's designed to inform local authorities, not to inform the public. And that's a problem because if you take the southeast of Ireland here we've had flooding in County Wexford, but the rain has been falling in County Wicklow in the mountains, and you don't really see the connection between what's happening in another county and what's happening in your county five hours later or 10 hours later. So there's a big debate as to how to improve that. And one of the things that I think is fairly obvious now is that we have the technology to do that very, very easily indeed. Because if you get into your car today and you look at the maps in your sat nav, you can often see the roads that are congested, they're marked in red or yellow or amber, and you avoid them. Now, that data comes from simply aggregating all the mobile phones that are in that area, and, you know, all the phones that are logged into a particular mast are giving you that kind of information. So it's quite straightforward to say, well, let's look at all the phones that are in this town that might be subject to flooding and send them an alert text in advance. And that would be fairly easy to do without an awful lot of expense, I suspect. But we should have done that 10 years ago and we should have developed these systems 10 years ago rather than now, starting from scratch in many ways, so we can really improve the safety. I know that our flooding at the moment in Ireland is costing 100 million euros a year, and the expectation is that, you know, the big bad one that might come along in two decades or so will cost us 500 million. I think that's an underestimate because that's only the gap between what is insured and what is actually damaged in terms of costs. So I think even if we take our big storm last year, In January of 2025, we had Storm Eowen, which cost 300 million in insurance costs alone. So these are very expensive events. And, you know, our failure to plan for them to adapt to climate change, I think is a real problem going ahead. And I'm, you know, the politicians will promise things after a flood. They'll go and inspect the area, they'll stand in their Wellingtons and then they'll go away. And two weeks later the issue will have been forgotten about. I mean, that's the problem.
• 23:05
  So, quick question about Ireland. Do you not have a warning system at all? And I feel like the Netherlands has got its ducks in a row here, even though we've got our share of problems. And definitely, I don't mean to suggest that, you know, everything is perfect here, but there is a system here called Enel Alert, which is not just used for flooding, but for pretty much everything and anything. It's built in case of war, but it's also been used to, for example, if a city is overflowing with traffic, they'll send you like and seriously overflowing to the point where it gets dangerous. There was a football match, a Soccer match for our American listeners out there there in 2017 between Ajax and Manchester United for the, for the Europa League final, I believe it was. And Amsterdam got so full that it was actually quite dangerous that, you know, there was a. There was a risk of stampeding and all that stuff. And so we, everyone who was close to Amsterdam, and not only inside Amsterdam, but also in the towns and cities nearby, got a message from the government saying, don't come to Amsterdam anymore. It's too far, it's dangerous, don't do that. And there are other, there are other warnings like when there's a big fire and dangerous, dangerous smoke is blowing into the atmosphere, dangerous chemicals like asbestos or anything like that. They'll also send an alert to the people around that area. Close your. Close your windows, turn off your ventilation. Ventilation, all that stuff. And so is that. Does, does that not exist in Ireland?
• 24:34
  No, it doesn't. No. All we have is yellow, orange and red rainfall warnings, which is when the rainfall reaches a threshold, or wind warnings or extreme cold or heat. But we don't have an ability to text people in the country or in a particular area at the moment. We were promised a test of this about a year ago, and I think it's due to happen sometime in the next few months. But it's still at a primitive level compared to what you described there. Amsterdam is what you might call a smart city where a lot of the technology is all tied up to talk to each other. We don't really have that yet. And that's quite clearly something that's essential going ahead now for the future. So I think these are great ideas and I'll certainly be bringing them to anybody I talk to in the next few weeks, because we're 10 years behind, I suspect. I don't know why we haven't spent the money. We tend to spend money on things that there are votes in, and there aren't a lot of votes in some of these issues, unfortunately.
• 25:46
  Yeah, I think you're. I think that that's put your, you've put your finger right on it there, John, because I think the problem is politicians. It's a lot of money, it's going to cost a lot of money. And politicians will do things that they get an immediate boost from. So they'll stand in their wellies in a flood and get their photograph taken, but five weeks later they're not going to really care about those people because they don't have. And they can promise all sorts of things and then, you know, if chances are they won't be in power in two, three years time. So you know, they'd get blamed for spending lots of money but they wouldn't get the benefit of oh look, this saved us from this weather event or whatever it is.
• 26:24
  And they probably won't be in office anyway. I mean, well, that's it exactly. The minister will be reshuffled.
• 26:30
  Exactly. So they just don't care. And it's funny because I've just been looking at that office of Public Works website that you were talking about that it's called water level ie and it's got, I mean not all of the rivers but most of the rivers in Ireland and they're done, you can look at them on a map and it gives you data for the previous five weeks and that's it. But there's no, you know, this river flows into that river. There's no connectivity with tides. And I mean obviously we have, I mean, I don't know, people have been talking on the radio about spring tides and we all know. So you know, that means higher water levels. But what people don't realize is that happens. It's related to the moon, it's not related to spring. People think it's to do with springtime.
• 27:17
  And it isn't at all.
• 27:18
  It's to do it.
• 27:19
  No, it is true.
• 27:20
  Yeah, that's actually funny because in Dutch springtide is actually springtide. Yeah, the same. It, it does not. It's the same. So. And spring and Dutch is lente. So yeah, when you, when you speak Dutch you, it's quite clear that it has nothing to do with the spring. But I didn't realize that. Yes, of course if you're an English speaker it may well confuse you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's funny and what.
• 27:45
  Claudia is saying is also very true of the floodplain issue because as you said, people are stopped building on the floodplains. But if you're a developer building houses in response to the acute housing emergency, once you've sold your houses and you're gone, maybe gone bankrupt in the next year, then the follow on impacts are not of concern to you, you've made your profit, you've moved on. And that's the unfortunate thing that the people who are left behind won't get insurance. I know cases here in Ireland where people have put deposits down on houses in a flood prone area and the flood has come and they've even lost their deposits as a consequence. That's the sad thing about it.
• 28:31
  There are some places that have done some flood remediation. Works. I don't really know. Like, for example, Bandon, the River Bandon used to burst its banks in Bandon all the time. Not all the time, but fairly regularly. And it would cause devastation for the local commercial, like local shops and that. And it was happening, you know, nearly every year there for a while. So they did a huge job there last summer, I think it was. John, I don't know if you know about this. And they did such a good job that the river actually dried up.
• 29:04
  Yeah, it's one of the success stories. Bandon and Clonmel and I think, you know, the OPW have identified 300 communities in Ireland at risk of flooding and they've prepared flood protection maps and flood protection plans for each one of 29 watersheds. The difficulty comes, though, when you move from the plan stage to the implementation stage, and that's where the administrative obstacles seem to slow the process down enormously. There is a Floods Directive, which we're all bound by in Europe, which means that we have to produce flood risk maps, but we have to update them every six years. Now, if you go to almost any part of Ireland, you'll find that, oh, there's been building in this area. Some of the catchment is now rendered impervious that it wasn't impervious before. The flood risk map has to be redrawn and changed. That may take another couple of years, and this is going on constantly. So that it means that it's very difficult to get the administrative system to react quickly and to get going on measures in the interim. But, you know, that's the real problem. It's the administrative system, rather than the freshwater pearl mussel or the weather service or the people that's responsible.
• 30:31
  What is the weather forecast for the coming days and weeks? Will it dry up or will you still receive a lot of rain?
• 30:38
  Well, I think at the moment, the signs are that the kind of static depression that we've got will last for another five or six days here, and then it will gradually begin to move into Europe. And when it moves into Europe, it will then bring down northerly winds to us for a few days. There is some research as well, which is quite worrying, which says that, you know, if we warm up the poles more quickly than the rest of the world, then we reduce that temperature gradient that drives the jet stream. And rather like a river which has no gradient, the jet stream begins to wobble, it gets locked in position, such as it is at the moment, and this brings us more extremes of both heat and cold, depending on which side you're on. And that's quite worrying if that goes on because the sea ice is retreating and it means that the Arctic is warming up very quickly indeed four times quicker than the rest of the world. So, you know, this is what's of concern for the future, that we may get those extremes becoming not just an extreme event, but almost an everyday or every year event, which we don't have at the moment.
• 31:53
  I actually read that such a thing happened before in Australia, where actually Australia used to be quite green and there'd be quite a bit growing there, but now. And there was an atmospheric river running over Australia that brought water and rain to Australia, to the middle of the continent. And that for some reason because of climate change, not human induced, but way, way earlier that changed and that river stopped streaming essentially and no rain was forthcoming to the, to the outback, which is why Australia is now so extremely dry. So that's basically just an example of what can happen when those atmospheric rivers stop flowing, when those jet streams stop flowing. You get extremes and you get drought and, or rain, just a lot of rain somewhere.
• 32:44
  And of course, Australia is very susceptible to the El Nino La Nina situation as well. And what really surprised people is that 2025 has become, I think, the second warmest year on record, even in the middle of a La Nina year, which is very unusual because when we have an El Nino year, the waters around the Pacific and around Australia mean that the global average temperature tends to be much warmer than average. And the fact that we're getting such heat overall in La Nina year is a bit worrying because it may suggest that the oceans are not absorbing as much of the heat we're putting into the atmosphere as they did in the past. And that's quite troubling because the oceans have got us out of trouble by absorbing 90% of all the anthropogenic heat that we've been creating since the Industrial Revolution. And if they stop taking that heat in and simply start warming up and not mixing it to depth like they were then it doesn't augur well for, especially places like Australia which are so susceptible, suitable to changes in rainfall, environment. Yeah, yeah.
• 34:06
  And is the common sense getting there or, you know, you. Well, we all know that in. There was a big event in Brazil where you also were.
• 34:18
  Yeah.
• 34:18
  Professor, did you observe any common sense or is there some hope? Well, obviously, because I always believe in some hope, but I. Or I hope to hope.
• 34:30
  Yeah, no, I, I've been to 15 cops at this stage, I think.
• 34:34
  15.
• 34:35
  Yeah, yeah. Oh, and I, I come, I always go full of enthusiasm and optimism and always come home despondent at the same time. But this, this was an unusual one because for the first time there was no presence from the United States. And at the same time the eu, which we were hoping would take leadership, was so divided that they couldn't make a common ground statement about where they wanted to go because countries like Italy and Hungary would not subscribe to the EU's position. So the EU was silenced, effectively, America wasn't there and everybody looked to China as a possible leader. And China, China didn't really want to know. China was quite interested in trade and quite interested in making money. And they have done good things in climate, but they didn't want to assume a leadership role. So there was a vacuum. And into that vacuum of course the petro states jumped very quickly indeed. So we had the Saudi Arabians and even the Indians not really wanting to mention the word fossil fuels at all in the final communique. So I think we lost ground, if anything, in COP 30, even the sentiments which mentioned fossil fuel were erased from previous cops, were erased from the communiques that came out of this one. And it really spells in a way a serious blow to multilateralism. The world has really operated on the basis that when we have a global problem, if we work together, we can crack it. And that works so well with the ozone hole, for example, which we solved on the basis of multilateralism. But you know, now countries are just acting in their own self interest, very much like individuals, but not really sharing the idea that we live in a common home, for example. So I'm not really optimistic at all the way things are going, unfortunately. And of course if you look at the European Commission, even they've been gradually downgrading a lot of the progress that was made in the Green Deal, for example, it's been picked apart under the guise of an omnibus simplification of rules for competitiveness. And really that's just largely a token gesture which is essentially hiding the fact that many of the good things that I would see in the Green Deal are gradually being erased as we speak. Almost.
• 37:30
  Well, you mentioned in the beginning also that your experience also a lot of floodings also in Morocco, etc. What is the general atmosphere there among the people and government, or is the there? Do they understand how it comes?
• 37:48
  Morocco has had difficulty with the weather for a long time. I think in since the 70s there have been successive droughts and then there might be a year or two where it's okay. But usually there's, there's a lot of drought. If I look back at the places where my mom and dad were born, where they used to describe it as green and people were there and farming and, you know, there's stuff growing all over the place. Now nature would be my. They, they were born in the northeast of the country in the Rift Mountains. Okay. And they were. And so when I go there now and take a picture with be my eyes, it describes it as a desert. So like there's, there's quite a few changes there and a lot of people fled from that area because it's just too dry. And now, of course, with the, with the rain coming in, they were very happy in the beginning, but now I think it's slightly too much and they're like, well, can we have slightly less maybe for the coming months. But in Morocco, Morocco is a middle income country. I think economic concerns are way bigger than climate concerns. I do not, I do, I do not know Moroccan politics inside and out. I don't really follow it all that much. But I do know that economic concerns are much more important because there is still real poverty there. Certainly the country has changed quite a bit even in my lifetime like this. Like the country has gone forward with leaps and bounds. It's amazing the transformation that has taken place, but it's still not, not on the level of Europe and Ireland and the US such that they can worry all that much about climate. I do know that Morocco has put a lot of money and effort into building, into building power plants using solar. So there are quite a few. I think there are three massive ones that can generate, generate a lot of power. In the middle of the country, they use solar power. I do think, although I'm not completely sure about that, that they do want to focus more on electric vehicles as opposed to diesel and gas vehicles. But I'm not quite sure how far along they are with that. They are building a better public transport system which might also help you save some emissions, but it's really a middle income country. So Morocco, so I don't expect Morocco will play a leadership role in climate legislation.
• 40:06
  But having said that more, I mean, Morocco did have one of the cops in Casablanca recently that I was at and I was very impressed by the amount of solar energy that they were planning to use. It seemed to be really quite ambitious but quite radical. And I was quite gobsmacked by the extent to which they had done what many other countries hadn't done in terms of planning for solar energy, of course, as you say, the resource is there. And there was a time when many people thought that Northern Africa could supply so much solar energy that it would maintain much of Europe's electricity in times of low wind, for example. And that I think has disappeared a wee bit because of unrest in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. But I still think that there are possibilities for a politically stable country like Morocco to maybe be a very valuable asset in terms of exporting energy to Europe, to Southern Europe in particular.
• 41:15
  Yeah. And there is, I think already it's called Noor 1 with Noor in Arabic as the light.
• 41:22
  Yes.
• 41:23
  There's one plant that does this already and I think they're planning a second one or maybe that second one is also online already. But they could build quite a few because that's a huge area where that, where that plant is. It's a huge area. They could build quite a few of those.
• 41:36
  As Mo was talking there, I was looking at the league table of countries that are performing well and it may surprise you more, but Morocco is the sixth best country in the world in terms of its climate change performance index. There's a league table produced every, every year for the COP conferences. And it's, it's basically.
• 41:59
  Can you mention please the number 1, 2, 6.
• 42:01
  Colour me impressed.
• 42:02
  Well, yeah, ironically this league table leaves one to three vacant because they say no country is doing sufficiently well to rank it. The next countries are denied Denmark, the United Kingdom, Morocco and Chile. So Morocco is actually the third best country in the world by that ranking. Something to be proud of. And for a middle economy country, as Maurice is saying, I think, you know, it's not as if it's up in the Nordic countries wealthy league, for example, so it's doing relatively well in that area. So. So well done. It has moved up considerably from its ranking in previous years. It's got a national adaptation plan for new buildings. Its low carbon outlook is positive in transportation, as Mo was saying, its renewables do need to expand more quickly. But it's, you know, it's doing not bad, let's be honest, in that sense. And it's so much better than, than the likes of Ireland, which is in 33rd place or something.
• 43:12
  No, that's embarrassing.
• 43:14
  In our country, the Netherlands, on which place are we number 40 or.
• 43:22
  Let me just find you. You are actually. You're not too bad. You're 10, you're 10th, you're 10th in the league. Yeah, so it's. You're above Norway, you're above Portugal, you're above Sweden, you're above Spain. So, you know, it's by no means mad. What are they saying about the Netherlands? Grid expansion is what you need there to take advantage of the new opportunities of solar and wind energy. But you, as you mentioned, you have a problem with agricultural pollution, which is the nitrates issue coming back again. And of course, the political, Political instability is not great as well.
• 44:03
  No, not right now, no.
• 44:04
  The market is dictating change. I think that's, you know, if you look at the United States, for example, their emissions are actually falling. You know, I was at a really strange conference in, would you believe, in Castel Gandolfo in October, and that's the Pope's summer residence. So we had this conference where Pope Leo came along and shared the stage, would you believe, with Arnold Schwarzenegger? No, you may think this is a strange combination and indeed I thought it was as well. But Arnold, apart from making the jibes at Pope Leo saying, you're the action man kind of thing, apart from that, he told the story of all the things he had done as governor of California and had laid down the legal framework and had achieved so much in terms of the energy transition there that it was quite impressive to hear him talk from a legislative point of view. And then Pope Leo talked from an ethical and moral point of view as well. And it was quite a powerful combination to hear the Pope talking about the hardship that the rich world is causing in the global south by not acting on climate. And Arnold talking about, well, this is how we can do that. This is how we can achieve that transition, which makes economic sense. And it was a really interesting conference which wasn't covered well by the media here in Ireland at all, although it was covered globally, I think quite well because the organizers brought a chunk of ice from Greenland and left it sitting on the stage for three days to let it gradually melt a huge square meter, cubic meter of ice. And there are some really strange pictures which went down the world of Pope Leo blessing this ice and it becoming, I suppose it became holy water instantly, of course, after that. But it was a reminder that, you know, apart from the economics, apart from the politics, there is a moral and ethical imperative involved in this issue for the future generations of people who we are going to leave a legacy of neglect of the present for them to cope with in the future. So I think there's a number of ways that I think this message can be brought home to people over the next few years. It'll be an economic one, as Mo said. It may well be an ethical one, but it also has to be a political one in the end of the day with a multilateral approach.
• 46:58
  Well, listen, John, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for talking to us and giving us so much time. I did promise your good lady wife that I wouldn't keep you too long, but, in fact, we've run the whole show with you, and it's been absolutely fantastic. I can't say enough. Thank you so much for coming onto the show.
• 47:17
  Thank you.
• 47:18
  That is it, ladies and gentlemen. We're gonna wrap the show up here with Professor John Sweeney, and hopefully you will take in, have taken some fruit and advice, and maybe we can begin to make things change for the better.
• 47:34
  Thank you very much. You're welcome.
• 47:36
  Thank you so much, John.
• 47:36
  Thanks.