How The War In The Middle East Impacts The Environment

0:00The last word with life pharmacy over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help life pharmacy live better together John Gibbons with us for the last word in the environment if you missed his culture club last night you can find it online but let's talk about environmental issues tonight John and war brings about death and unfortunately many people have died because of the American Israeli assault on Iran but it also brings about destruction and that destruction has incredible environmental consequences so it's not just the bombing of buildings but it's also when you see things like the LNG facilities and oil terminals and oil tankers going up and flames just so much damage doesn't all do yeah the the tally on this is colossal I mean to take a step back the Ukraine war the carbon emissions just carbon emissions from four years of destruction from the Russian invasion

1:02of Ukraine is so far tallied at about 300 million tons what does that mean context that's about five years of total annual emissions from Ireland from all sectors for five years just in relations the conflict this is nothing to do with Russian emissions non-war emissions so it's a colossal addition we're seeing for example in the opening two weeks of the Iran assault we're looking at five million tons of carbon emissions now it breaks down that in different ways I mean there's obviously colossal amounts of resources being deployed there's the the machinery of war is you know voracious the moving battleships moving aircraft carriers these things gop down colossal amounts of fuel so that's one side of it but probably the largest tally is on the sheer destruction and we've seen that obviously infamously in Gaza you know tens of thousands of homes businesses institutions hospitals everything completely leveled turn to rubble

2:08I'm sorry which is not happening in Lebanon of course we're seeing that repeated that same pattern repeated in southern Lebanon and god knows where next and that at some point there will be a reconstruction of these areas and the embedded carbon losses there are running again into tens maybe hundreds of millions of tons and that is in no way to be an anyway glib about the incredible human and I would say non-human suffering think of the wildlife the animals the livestock that are caught in these war zones as helpless and as as caged as the humans that are caught as well in the same situation so and it's not a game to the peak headsets of this world no totally I mean like we've seen for example already colossal destruction in in Iran for example and and we've covered Gaza so far we've seen over 16,000 homes three and a half thousand businesses 77 medical centers 69 schools flattened and this is really just getting started and as you say for no good

3:12reason and it is a remarkable thing that you know we have we have organizations like the the UN and the world meteorological organization ringing alarm bells saying that you know we're running out of time the climate emergency is slipping away and yet the great powers the so-called great powers they're moving the opposite direction see listener says it's crazy warlords can do that to our world which also was demonized from our separating recycling from the black bins disgusting yeah I mean we have to do all of the above mass right there's no get out of jail card I'm sorry to say for any of us but I I've huge sympathy with your listener because you know it is heartbreaking when lots of people out there are making a genuine effort to see such wanton destruction such such love of violence and destruction and such nihilism that that you know nihilism has always been a characteristic of humans but it it tended to be out on the on the lunatic fringes and it's incredible to see that that anarchic nihilism now in you know in writing the heart of some of the

4:14most powerful countries in the world just isn't a side and we mean there's all sorts of things happening such as we've been told to drive more slowly so as to save on petrol and diesel when we're moving in our cars the Irish Daily Mail had a front page story this morning saying that you're the cotton excise duty that applies also to private jet fuel I was surprised the only thing that would surprise me in that is if the exise duty applied in the first place map because again we've discussed this many times here aviation very few benefits from New York taxpayer subsidy in the form of taxes that are not levied on it but I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised and and again I think it's often been remarked that that the even the existence of private aviation in a climate emergency it's in a front to ordinary people trying to make to make efforts and obviously if it has to exist it should be taxed out three times the level of your family car I suppose it has to be said as well that it's an ill-win that blows no good at all I mean Trump and his and his antics in particular have been a fantastic

5:21business card for the renewable transition map there's no question about that I mean I know he's trying to burn the world out but essentially it's an unintended consequence of course it is but it really is an ill-wind that blows no good because again we're seeing this a stronger and stronger pivot from the likes of the Chinese going further and further into renewable energy and also I mean I know we've talked about things like LNG in Ireland and you can make the case or you can argue for it and you can argue against it but overall I mean the collective goose of the fossil sector is cooked okay let's move away from this disgusting illegal war for a while and all the things that came up this week tell us about how the arts climate is showing a record energy in balance yeah this comes from the the World Meas Relogical Organization state of the global climate report for 2025 and they put together quite a remarkable run they found that the the hottest years on the instrumental record mountain that goes back reliable global instrumental records exist to about 1850 so over that period of time to 2025 the 11 hottest years

6:26have all occurred since 2015 so statistically the likelihood of that being random in any shape or form would be probably billions to one again so so the trend is overwhelmingly strong and what they're saying in particular is the colossal accumulation of heat energy in the earth system and as opposed to the best way I can describe this is that the earth despite you know when when you're outside and you look up in the sky it looks infinite it's like you're looking into space but in fact the envelope the atmospheric envelope that wraps around the world is probably matter about the distance from studio here in Stevens Green out to about gray stones if you were to go straight up from from Dublin city center to gray stones that is the the height above us of the global atmosphere so all the junk all the emissions all the the the the burning and the pillaging all of that essentially is ending up being trapped in that narrow band of atmosphere above our head but worse than that we're also seeing a massive accumulation of heat energy in the global oceans but what we're now recording is warming of the world's oceans down to a depth

7:31of 2,000 meters in other words two kilometers miles straight down the water is being warmed down to that depth now they they calculate that the world's oceans are absorbing 18 times more than the total annual human energy use and that has been the case over the last two decades now to try to and some of these numbers are colossal so there is a sort of an index that some people use it's called a Hiroshima index where you take the power of the Hiroshima bomb right forget about the nuclear part the waste part of it just the the energy release of a Hiroshima bomb and then you try to calculate how the earth's energy imbalance is building when you compare it to Hiroshima bombs so at the moment over the last 12 months we're accumulating energy in the earth system at the rate of 12 Hiroshima's per second every second of the day over the last 12 months that translates seems almost unbelievable that translates to approximately 380 million Hiroshima's in excess energy being trapped in the earth system it is mind boggling is that why El Nino apparently is going to

8:37return this year well no El Nino and Laninia these are natural cyclical processes and they tend to originate in the in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and it's to do with the upwelling and downwelling of currents so these are natural systems so they they tend to occur typically the last 9 to 12 months the last one we had was actually 2024 which by no coincidence was also the hottest year ever recorded in the world so we actually cooled off slightly in 2025 we're expecting now the science estimates that we're going to we've got a one-in-three chance of a strong El Nino by the end of 2026 the likelihood is that we will therefore see record temperatures again in 2027 so there is oscillation but the El Nino process is is a natural cycle process it affects for example the movement and position of the jet stream it affects around the world but the main impacts matter that we can measure from a like from a strong El Nino is global temperatures go up

9:41droughts intensify and tell you just come down harder than ever a Monday night we tried to get Professor Iris Moller to join us she's Trinity College's coastal geomorphologist and she had said that planning must be put in place as a matter of urgency for extreme weather events on the east coast of Ireland why well again this is to do with rising sea levels at coastal inundation and of course our east coast particularly is is where the great population centers are based and also as as any geographer will tell you the east coast is largely made of clay the west coast is mostly rocky and therefore more resistant to erosion but we're seeing colossal erosion anyone who's walked along the east coast for example you can no longer walk on the on the pathway between Bray and Greystones it has been closed down we also of course have our our dart and our double into Wexford line under imminent threat of disappearing into into the into the sea so these are again processes that are being accelerated because again we're getting more powerful

10:44storms we're getting more torrential rainfall which again weakens the soil and increases the likelihood of subsidence and also and it's something again we've talked about before Matt for example we now know in Ireland alone right now about a hundred thousand households do not have flood insurance right now that number is going to probably double possibly by the end of this decade and increasingly as we get more and more places facing coastal inundation and again sometimes by the way this is a matter of luck I give you an example storm chandra rolled in in February right but we we we dodged the bullet because it didn't it didn't coincide with the high spring tide had it written in on a high spring tide we would have been looking at tens maybe hundreds of millions of euros of flood damage so there's only so many of these bullets that we can dodge and I know I noticed that professor Muller had actually observed and it did sound radical the idea of preparing for emergency evacuation and this unfortunately is is something that we're going to be

11:45looking at more and more because essentially more powerful storms riding in on higher sea storm surges that are being lifted by global sea level rise Matt and of course we're very much part of that system we're we're sitting right out in the Atlantic so everything that happens in the world's oceans are happening right here in Ireland John Gibbons thank you very much for joining us for the last word in the environment the last word with life pharmacy over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help life pharmacy live better together