In this new series of four podcasts host Gill Plunkett explores the long view of climate change by interviewing the authors of 'Climate and Society in Ireland'. We talk about hunter gatherers, disease, poetry, weather events and consider our future vulnerabilities. In epidode 3, Bruce Campbell (QUB) and Francis Ludlow (TCD) consider the effects that climate had on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people in late medieval Ireland. Bruce Campbell is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Economic History at The Queen’s University of Belfast. Francis Ludlow is Assistant Professor of Medieval Environmental History, Trinity College Dublin . '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. The book is available from our website: www.ria.ie/climate-and-society-ireland

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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