Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Jul 30, 2026 at 2:04:17 PM EDT, "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. 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

Indigenous peoples in North America have been conrolling the threat of wild
fires with prescribed/controlled burns for centuries. Canada is looking to do
the same in co-operation with our native people. We have a problem doing this
however because of the acessibility and vastness of our forests. But in a
country the size of Britain (and other European countries), it seems to me
that controlled fires are a no brainer.