UK Nature and Environment

474 readers

37 users here now

General Instance Rules:

No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users.
Do not share intentionally false or misleading information.
Do not spam or abuse network features.

Community Specific Rules:

Keep posts UK-specific. There are other places on Lemmy to post articles which relate to global environmental issues (e.g. slrpnk.net).
Keep comments in English so that they can be appropriately moderated.

Note: Our temporary logo is from The Wildlife Trusts. We are not officially associated with them.

Our winter banner is a shot of Shotley marshes, Suffolk by GreyShuck.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

GreyShuck@feddit.uk

Kim@feddit.uk

UK peatland fires are supercharging carbon emissions as climate change causes hotter, drier summers (www.cam.ac.uk)

submitted 20 hours ago by GreyShuck@feddit.uk to c/nature@feddit.uk

1 comments fedilink hide all child comments

More fires, taking hold over more months of the year, are causing more carbon to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Fires on peatlands, which are carbon-rich, can almost double global fire-driven carbon emissions. Researchers found that despite accounting for only a quarter of the total UK land area that burns each year, dwarfed by moor and heathland, wildfires that burn peat have caused up to 90% of annual UK fire-driven carbon emissions since 2001 – with emissions spikes in particularly dry years.

Peat only burns when it’s hot and dry enough - conditions that are occurring more often with climate change. The peatlands of Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, and Flow Country in northern Scotland, have both been affected by huge wildfires in recent years.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] davesmith@feddit.uk 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

The biosphere is a metastable system. We are in the process of knocking it out of the state in which we have thrived, to something far less hospitable to human life. In the process so many of these fossil fuel reserves will burn. Various previous carbon sinks are already sources.

There is always a best and worse case scenario, so always a reason to take action, but a great deal of harm is already locked in.

Human ingenuity is a hell of a thing, but forget Musk's always-an-obvious-con of colonising Mars, there is a much better chance (imho) that humans don't survive re-colonising this new planet Earth over the coming centuries to millennia than travelling across the galaxy in what is, let's face it, a Star Trek inspired fantasy.