Re: The unspoken truth about wildfires

On Sat, 1 Aug 2026 18:04:46 +0100, Julian <[email protected]>
wrote:

>On 30/07/2026 19:04, Julian 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
>
>The EU has failed to get a grip on Europe’s wildfires

As if any old carpenter would know how to do that.  Stupid eu anyway.

>Europe is burning. From France to Spain, from Portugal to Greece, and 
>even in Britain, the continent has been engulfed by flames this summer. 
>In France, more than 117,000 hectares have been lost to a succession of 
>wildfires and nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated. 
>It’s already been dubbed ‘the worst season of fire in history’.
>
>In Madrid, Paris and in other European capitals, politicians argue about 
>the fires – or rather the response to them. The lack of fire-fighting 
>aircraft in France, for example, has been seized on by opponents of 
>Emmanuel Macron’s government.
>
>Some of the media have focused on the human aspect: the fact that the 
>majority of the fires have been started by people, either inadvertently 
>or deliberately. Hundreds of arrests (predominantly young males) have 
>been made by European police forces and in France courts intend to take 
>‘tougher criminal action’ to deal with fire-starters.
>
>But all this misses the crucial point, as Matt Ridley wrote in this 
>week’s magazine. Most of Europe has made a mess of its wildfire 
>management strategy this century. Ridley quoted Andrew Gilruth, chief 
>executive of the Moorland Association, who explained: ‘In England the 
>authorities are obsessed with rewilding and restricting all commonsense 
>measures for reducing fuel loads.’
>
>A lack of common sense has characterised Europe’s response to wildfires 
>in the 21st century. During the scorching summer of 2003, some 740,000 
>hectares were burnt and in response, the EU ‘set up an expert group to 
>advise on how to prevent and fight fires in Europe’.
>
>They published a report in early 2005, Forest Fires in Europe, declaring 
>that their ‘general principle is to restore nature and not to change the 
>landscape’. The report contained a great many statistics about forest 
>fires in EU member states and bemoaned ‘the lack of a common EU forestry 
>policy framework’. The report recognised the increased risk because of 
>‘climate change and desertification’ but it didn’t offer coherent solutions.
>
>It took another 21 years before the EU finally unveiled its wildfire 
>strategy in March this year. It contained the usual Brussels waffle 
>about ‘holistic approaches’ and ‘stakeholders’. Roxana Mînzatu, the 
>Executive Vice-President for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and 
>Preparedness, declared:
>
>Europe must be ready before the first fire starts. That means building a 
>real culture of preparedness: equipping people with the right skills, 
>supporting firefighters and first responders, and helping communities 
>understand the risks they face.
>
>Underneath the trite soundbites, there was a recognition in the report 
>that Europe has allowed great areas of combustible vegetation to spread 
>throughout EU member states in recent decades. Abandoned farmland and 
>unmanaged forests, together with droughts and rising temperatures, have 
>created the conditions for a perfect firestorm.
>
>The report said that in order to prevent future wildfires, the EU must 
>pay ‘farmers and foresters to thin forests, graze livestock and restore 
>abandoned land’. It also recommended restoring peatlands, flood plains 
>and wetlands to retain moisture.
>
>This strategy will take years to implement effectively. And, crucially, 
>has the EU really got the will? At a meeting of agriculture ministers in 
>Brussels in May, Environment Conmissioner Jessika Roswall announced that 
>the Commission does ‘not plan any new initiatives on forest management’.
>
>The management of forests and land planning is also the preserve of 
>individual governments and the EU has struggled for a unified approach. 
>Brussels can recommend and encourage but it can’t force governments to 
>act. Sweden and Finland are the most resistant to EU interference on 
>forest management, while France also broadly believes the issue should 
>be one of national competence.
>
>Critics claim there is no competence. There was a huge wildfire in the 
>south-west of France in 2022, an area famous for its intensive maritime 
>pine monoculture. Many hectares of pine trees were lost. The response? 
>To replant thousands of pine trees in exactly the same layout.
>
>On Monday, Emmanuel Macron visited the Gironde department, in the 
>south-west of France, where more than 40,000 hectares have been lost to 
>flames this month. The president was confronted by the independent mayor 
>of one town affected by the fire.
>
>‘We need a better-maintained, larger firebreak, even if it means losing 
>1,000 or 2,000 hectares,’ said Bruno Lafon, the independent mayor of 
>Biganos and the head of the association for the protection of forests 
>against fire in his region.
>
>Lafon also took aim at politicians and environmentalists pontificating 
>in Paris. ‘We need to stop talking,’ he said, adding that the Paris 
>elite and the people whose homes are burning ‘no longer live in the same 
>world’.
>
>The same rings true of the Brussels elite. It’s time to stop talking and 
>take commonsense action.
>
>
>Gavin Mortimer
-- 
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