Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:04:17 +0100, Julian <[email protected]>
wrote:

>Bordeaux and Madrid are threatened by flames. In Sicily, arsonists tied 
>burning rags to the tails of cats to spread fires. Here in Britain the 
>Cairngorms and Peak District national parks are ablaze. It’s the climate 
>Armageddon, say the greens. If only we had built more wind farms and 
>eaten fewer cows this would not be happening.
>
>Hot, dry spells undoubtedly make fires more likely, but awkwardly for 
>those blaming climate change, wildfires are getting less frequent 
>worldwide, not more, as the globe warms.

Ready for the do noting, deny pitch?  Hold on to your hat and don't
stand up, here it comes.

>The acreage burned has 
>decreased steadily since 2000, according to Nasa’s satellites, and is 
>thought to have almost halved in a century. The great fires of 1871 in 
>Wisconsin and Michigan burned more than a million hectares long before 
>anybody drove a car, before even Joseph Swan’s first light bulb, when 
>the world was cooler.
>
>It is not just the trend that is surprising. Hard to believe, but this 
>year is an unusually quiet year for wildfire: so quiet it is breaking 
>records for lack of fires by this date, even in Europe. If you don’t 
>believe me, check the figures produced by the Global Wildfire 
>Information System: as of last week, the world had seen 106 million 
>hectares burn this year, the lowest at this date since these records 
>began in 2012. In Europe, just 3.6 million hectares have burned – less 
>than half the average for this date. That’s cold comfort to people 
>driven from their homes in France, but it is nonetheless a fact.
>
>The real issue is that climate change is a handy excuse for politicians 
>who have failed to take precautionary measures to prevent wildfires. 
>They can just shrug: it’s global warming, innit? It has been known for 
>many decades that in fire-prone habitats, the longer you go without a 
>fire, the worse the fires will be. So preventing the build-up of tinder 
>by controlled burns is the most important factor.
>
>The California filmmaker Gabriel Mann’s hard-hitting 2023 documentary 
>Hotshot showed in detail how fire suppression has made today’s fires 
>harder to control. He has no patience with those who use climate change 
>as an alibi. ‘They tell you the sky is falling and it’s all the fault of 
>our modern, shitty climate,’ he says. ‘But when was the climate not shitty?’
>
>Here in Britain the government has consistently and relentlessly 
>demanded less ‘cool’ burning – low-intensity, controlled fires – in 
>winter on heather moorland, Britain’s most fire-prone habitat. Such 
>fires have been used by farmers and gamekeepers for generations to 
>create a mosaic of short and long heather. This encourages fresh young 
>heather shoots for sheep and grouse to feed on and makes open areas for 
>rare birds such as golden plover and curlew to nest in. If done in 
>winter it can burn off the rank heather plants while leaving the moss 
>underneath barely touched, as demonstrated by a famous video in which a 
>gamekeeper places a Mars bar in the moss, lights a fierce fire over it, 
>then picks up the unscorched, unmelted chocolate bar, unwraps it and 
>eats it.
>
>Natural England argues that regular cool burning harms the habitat; 
>researchers at York University and elsewhere argue the opposite: that it 
>encourages the growth of sphagnum moss and other species by letting 
>light in. But both sides agree that regular cool burns can dramatically 
>reduce the risk of much more damaging wildfires, which burn down through 
>the moss layer and into the peat. Cutting heather instead is less 
>effective but better than nothing. Yet Natural England has banned 
>heather burning on deep peat altogether and is pushing hard to limit it 
>further everywhere – or at least tie it up in complicated licensing 
>rules. As a result, the fuel load on heather moorland has been 
>increasing; in places the heather is now waist-deep. The National Fire 
>Chiefs Council warned last year that such restrictions on heather 
>management would increase ‘the danger to firefighters and the public’.
>
>Unlike private owners, bodies such as the Royal Society for the 
>Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the National Trust are refusing to burn 
>and reluctant to graze heather moorland, as they join the cult of 
>‘rewilding’. With the support of government, they plan to mitigate the 
>fire risk by ‘rewetting’ moors with leaky dams to hold back rainwater. 
>But this approach is useless in a drought.
>
>Case in point: the Tintwistle fire in the Peak District spread from a 
>wild camp in woodland on to a heather moor owned by United Utilities and 
>managed by the RSPB. This moor had been extensively ‘rewetted’ yet it 
>went up like a torch and the fire spread, drowned Manchester in smoke, 
>burned deep into the peat and was only contained – for now – when local 
>gamekeepers and Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue used two diggers and 
>a bulldozer to create a firebreak on its northwest flank on the 
>neighbouring Stalybridge estate. But so quick is Natural England to 
>prosecute landowners and gamekeepers for even inadvertently breaking 
>rules about managing habitat that they were anxious they might be 
>punished for doing this.
>
>Richard Bailey, coordinator of the Peak District Moorland Group, 
>estimates that the past month’s firefighting by gamekeepers would have 
>cost the taxpayer millions of pounds if done by the fire service. Many 
>long, hot, hard days and nights have left gamekeepers and their families 
>under severe mental strain, alleviated a little by generous food drops 
>from Micklehurst cricket club. You can imagine how much it sticks in the 
>craw for these gamekeepers that they have been working to save land 
>managed by an organisation that makes the risk worse.
>
>The nearby Dovestone fire was also started on RSPB-managed land after a 
>man drowned in the local reservoir and his friends commemorated him with 
>fireworks. The Cairngorms fire too began on land owned by the RSPB at 
>Abernethy. The irony is not lost on locals that the very same people who 
>tell us that climate change is an existential crisis are also the ones 
>urging us to stop using the one tool we know helps to mitigate the 
>problem. If your view is that climate change is a massive threat, why 
>are you pursuing policies that increase fuel load?
>
>The North York Moors fire last year affected 2,500 hectares of moorland, 
>smouldering for more than a month in the peat and releasing vast 
>quantities of carbon dioxide. Yet no Defra minister bothered to visit. 
>The cost of fighting these fires does not fall on their department, so 
>why do they care, says Jamie Blackett, founder of Ground Cry, a new 
>organisation campaigning on behalf of ground-nesting birds like curlews.
>
>The authorities know their policies increase the fire risks. Here is 
>what the Cairngorm National Park says in its Integrated Wildfire 
>Management Plan about plans to increase shrubs and other vegetation by 
>reducing deer and stopping burning: ‘These habitats will take many years 
>to develop and during the intervening period fuel loads will increase, 
>as will the corresponding need for fire risk mitigation.’ So they knew 
>the risk was increasing. But little was done. John Kirk, a board member 
>of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, told the Strathspey Herald: 
>‘Everyone is furious… the entire Abernethy forest has no firebreaks.’
>
>Andrew Gilruth, chief executive of the Moorland Association, says: 
>‘While Scotland has a clear plan to manage the excess vegetation, in 
>England the authorities are obsessed with rewilding and restricting all 
>commonsense measures for reducing fuel loads.’
>
>In May, before the drought, Gilruth wrote to MPs who represent moorland 
>constituencies to point out that the number of firefighters is down by a 
>quarter over the past seven years and that the fire service relies 
>heavily on gamekeepers’ vehicles, water bowsers and other equipment. 
>Banning the burning of heather means fewer keepers can justify having 
>such equipment. He described Defra’s refusal to change policy on heather 
>burning as reckless.
>
>Sadly he was proved right. So was I. After I warned in these very pages 
>last year that government policy was worsening the fire risk on 
>moorland, it gives me no pleasure to say: ‘I told you so.’
>
>
>Matt Ridley
-- 
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away