Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Jul 30, 2026 at 2:53:09 PM EDT, "Julian" <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 30/07/2026 19:29, Tara wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Are inaccessible fires in vast forests really a problem?
> I think they're as likely good for the land's long term health.

There is that, but an uncontrolled fire can massively grow and send a lot of
smoke to people populated areas.