Climate and society in Ireland

from prehistory to the present

Tomas O Carragain, James Kelly

• Publisher: Royal Irish Academy
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781911479758
• Topic: History
• Index: History

Can a long-term perspective on human adaptations to climate change inform Ireland's response to the crisis we face today?Climate and Society in Ireland is a collection of essays, commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy, that provides a multi-period, interdisciplinary perspective on one of the most important challenges currently facing humanity. Combining syntheses of existing knowledge with new insights and approaches, contributors explore the varied environmental, climatic and social changes that occurred in Ireland from early prehistory to the early 21st century. The essays in the volume engage with a diversity of pertinent themes, including the impact of climate change on the earliest human settlement of Ireland; weather-related food scarcities during medieval times that led to violence and plague outbreaks; changing representations of weather in poetry written in Ireland between 1600 and 1820; and how Ireland is now on the threshold of taking the radical steps necessary to shed its 'climate laggard' status and embark on the road to a post-carbon society.With contributions by Máire Ní Annracháin, Katharina Becker, David M. Brown, Lucy Collins, Lisa Coyle McClung, Bruce M.S. Campbell, Rosie Everett, Benjamin Gearey, Raymond Gillespie, Seren Griffiths, James Kelly, Francis Ludlow, Meriel McClatchie, Conor Murphy, Simon Noone, Aaron Potito, Gill Plunkett, Phil Stastney, Graeme T. Swindles, John Sweeney, Graeme Warren.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: constructing the history of climate and society in Ireland
• Climate change and hunter gatherers in Ireland: problems, potentials and pressing research questions
• Tracing environmental, climatic and social change in Neolithic Ireland
• A question of scale? A review of interpretations of Irish peatland archaeology in relation to Holocene environmental and climate change
• Siccitas magna ultra modum: examining the occurrence and societal impact of droughts in prehistoric Ireland
• On the brink of Armageddon? Climate change, the archaeological record and human activity across the Bronze Age– Iron Age transition in Ireland
• Cultural change and the climate record in final prehistoric and early medieval Ireland
• Climate, disease and society in late-medieval Ireland
• Climate, weather and social change in seventeenth-century Ireland
• Climate, weather and society in Ireland in the long eighteenth century: the experience of the later phases of the Little Ice Age
• ‘Nature herself seems in the vapours now’: poetry and climate change in Ireland 1600–1820
• Seeing the natural world: Comhbhá an Dúlra
• Reconstruction of hydrological drought in Irish catchments (1850–2015)
• Climate and society in modern Ireland: past and future vulnerabilities