A top temperature of 31.2 degrees picked up at Armagh Planetarium this July 18 was 14.1 degrees higher than the same date in 1922.
Armagh Planetarium and Observatory has been collecting weather data for almost 200 years.
And thermometer readings collected on the same date each decade for the last century shows temperatures are rising here.
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While not a climate scientist, the Planetarium’s director, Professor Michael G Burton, is a physicist.
He says: “We can see what’s going on in our weather record, that’s for sure.
“Over the course of the 200 and whatever years that we have been measuring it, you can clearly see the rise in the average temperature over the last three of four decades is very apparent.
“There’s no doubt there’s a warming going on.”
Climate scientists have been warning for decades that human activity is causing global warming, but some still don’t believe the science.
Professor Burton said they keep track of temperatures in Armagh with ‘dry bulb’ thermometers.
“It’s a technical term but it basically means the air temperature. You don’t measure where the sun shines because you don’t get a reliable temperature,” he explained.
“We typically measure at 9am each day and the max temperature is within a 24-hour period.”
The professor says “from the scientific point of view there is absolutely no doubt the temperatures are changing - we see it all over the world”.
“It’s quite clear that it’s the last three or four decades where the impact is significant.
“Where the debate comes in is what’s actually causing it and a lot of research goes into looking at that and climate change.
“The modelling doesn’t find any other rational explanation for what’s going on.
“If you add gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it acts like a kind of blanket and absorbs the radiation coming in.
“It gets trapped by the various molecules in the air.
“If you change the amount of carbon dioxide you are going to change the amount of heat that is trapped and that’s basically what we are seeing.
“The real trouble is what we have to do to counter this incredibly challenging situation,” he added.
“We have to essentially stop the production of these greenhouse gases or slow it down.
“You can see that people don’t want to accept this is the case.”
But he says everyone around the globe has to play their part.
“What’s specific to us in this part of the world is peat burning because peat is readily available,” continued Prof Burton.
“It’s an intense contributor to greenhouse gases. Both coal and peat are soups of greenhouse gases.
“Over the course of geological time the carbon dioxide which was in the atmosphere - a lot of it has gone into these materials which were in the ground.
“By burning it we are releasing back the accumulated emissions over millions of years and we’re putting that back into the atmosphere and that’s ultimately the cause of the warming.
“If we look at the 18th of July - the top ten 18th of July [temperatures] - five of them have happened in the last 16 years.
“That’s in over 200 years of measurements that we’ve done.”
Professor Burton was one of a number of officials and academics invited to COP26 in Glasgow from Northern Ireland.
The Planetarium is also working to highlight climate change here.
He added: “It’s something the younger generation are certainly aware of and how big an issue it is.
“We have a climate change exhibition now [and] we can be a vehicle for showing and explaining what’s going on and making people aware of the nature of the problem.
“That’s what we did in the Planetarium show we did for COP26... to illustrate how what’s happening now is usual.
“We have to appreciate and understand what’s going on before we have to address that problem.
“There’s an awareness that we have to make that change but when you ask people what they are prepared to do to cut that down - I can’t even answer that myself.
“There’s a limit to what individuals can do - it has to be at a societal level,” he added.
“The big things are how we produce electricity and we have to solve that as a society.
“Our ambition is to further explore the use of our dome for educational programmes and to explain what’s going on.”
Climate risk to human extinction 'dangerously underexplored'
Meanwhile, the climate risk to human extinction or total societal collapse has been “dangerously underexplored”, according to a group of climate scientists.
It follows a study called ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios’ led by Dr Luke Kemp at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
The work, which involved experts around the world, found while uncertainties on future emissions suggest the chance of climate catastrophe is small there are “ample reasons” to suspect such scenarios can’t be ruled out.
As a result they believe the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of climate induced apocalyptic disaster.
“Climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood,” the scientists said.
The paper, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlighted how research on climate change “focused on the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse”.
But added, there have been “few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3 °C or above”.
“There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” says lead author Dr Luke Kemp.
“Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history. Even the modern world seems adapted to a particular climate niche.
“Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events.
“Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities and impede recovery from potential disasters such as nuclear war.
“The catastrophic risk is there, but we need a more detailed picture.
“A greater appreciation of catastrophic climate scenarios can help compel public action.”
Now those behind the study are calling on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to dedicate a future report to catastrophic climate change to galvanise research and inform the public.
“We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” added Dr Kemp.
The team behind the PNAS paper propose a research agenda that includes what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine and malnutrition, extreme weather, conflict, and vector-borne diseases.
Rising temperatures pose a major threat to global food supply, they say, with increasing probabilities of “breadbasket failures” as the world’s most agriculturally productive areas suffer collective meltdowns.
They also believe hotter and more extreme weather could create conditions for new disease outbreaks as habitats for both people and wildlife shift and shrink.
The authors caution climate breakdown will likely exacerbate other “interacting threats” from rising inequality and misinformation to democratic collapse and even new forms of destructive AI weaponry.
Dr Kemp added: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while remaining blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk-management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
