Global Weirding and Food Production in Ireland

A look at whether all that rainfall is impacting our ability to produce food

With all the rain Ireland has had recently, I decided to see just how out of the ordinary these last 11 months have been. I picked a couple of weather stations in Roscommon - Loughglinn and Mount Dillion - and plotted the cumulative rainfall from June 1st to May 31st of the following year from 1944 through to 2024.

So we can see that the last 11 months have indeed been well above mean and are set to be the third wettest period since 1944 at these stations. The two wetter periods were 2015-2016 and 2020-2021. The wettest period was almost 50% wetter than the mean.

Here’s a video showing how this has progressed since 1944. Note the occurrence of lines above the mean line after 2000.

The idea of global warming is often met happily in Ireland with a “great, now we can grow our own grapes and go to the beach”. Such reactions are because global warming is far too benign a term. A better one proposed by Thomas Firedman is “global weirding”. This is exactly as it sounds - the defining characteristic difference between pre-industrial weather and now is its weirdness. Places will get hotter and colder, dryer and wetter. Storms will visit places they never had before. If this term had been adopted from the outset we wouldn’t have had to deal with 99% of climate change denialism: “it’s raining and cold outside so the scientists must be having us on”.

I like to picture the weather as following an average trajectory (the mean), and the departures from the norm fall within a certain distance from the mean (the standard deviation). Well global weirding means those departures from the norm are much wilder than they were in pre-industrial times.

What all of this means is that, long before the apocalyptic sea level rise, food production will be impacted since all our crops evolved during 10,000 years of steady, fairly predictable weather. 

So is Ireland’s food production being affected? Here are crop yields from 2008 to 2023.

So there have been 3 dips in the past 6 years.

Lets take a look at milk which is a instant signal since more rain means less grass for cows, and less milk yield.

This looks pretty good with a steady increase, and only a slight dip in 2023. So much for global weirding, eh? Well not quite. Much of this increase is explained by farmers switching over to dairy from other enterprises over recent years. Here’s the increase in Ireland’s national dairy herd:

So the dip in milk production in 2023 may be a stronger indicator than it first appears. Fitting a regression model to the milk yield data gives the following:

Ouch. 

Since data is available on the CSO for the first 3 months of 2024, lets compare the cumulative amount for these 3 months over the years.

So 2024 milk production is indeed reflecting the terrible levels of global weirding - in our case all that rain - we’ve had over the past 11 months. 

It is often stated that Ireland is the most food secure country in the world. This is nonsense. If you ignore essential food groups and just count up all the calories we produce from dairy, and look at all the calories we eat, you could say we’re food secure. Nobody can live on milk and butter alone though. In reality, Ireland currently imports four calories of every five that it eats, two thirds of the protein eaten and three quarters of the essential fats.

But global weirding means every country is going to have their own version of the above. With countries experiencing hits to their food production, how willing will they be to export? And where does that leave Ireland? Nothing could be more important that food security but the Irish model is still completely reliant on comparative advantage - the idea that if country A produces nuts and apples, but is better at nuts, and so does country B, but it's better at apples, then country A should concentrate on nuts and country B on apples, bringing the cost down for all market participants. Comparative advantage doesn’t apply when Country B can’t produce enough nuts because it’s been hit by flooding. 

While the signs above are early - we’ll know more in 3 to 4 years - they do point to the beginning of food security issues inevitably brought on by global weirding. Ireland urgently needs to take food security seriously and start incentivising the production of food locally across all food groups.