Climate change: Lake District facing ‘dramatic’ soil erosion–Latest Junk Science

By Paul Homewood

This week’s climate hysteria concerns “dramatic” soil erosion in the Lake District!

The Lake District is suffering from soil erosion at a "dramatic rate" and could look very different in 50 years’ time, an academic has warned.

Dr Simon Carr, programme leader for geography at the University of Cumbria, said extreme weather caused by climate change is stripping the fells.

He argues halting grazing by animals would be a good way to restore the land by allowing vegetation to recover.

However, farmers warn a "blanket ban" could lead to food shortages.

Dr Carr, who helped compile the Lake District’s State of the Park plan in 2018, believes droughts followed by devastating storms in the past few years are at the heart of the issue.

He said: "The conditions are absolutely perfect for causing degradation to the landscape.

"They desiccate the peaks, they dry it, they become very breakable and erode very easily when you have a storm.

"It’s taken 10,000 years to create the soils we see in the Lake District, and the rate of loss is really quite dramatic.

"Within a few decades we’re going to see the areas of bare rock we see on the mountains stretching further and further down slope.

"We’re maybe talking about 50 years. It could be less."

Dr Carr said there is "significant evidence" of erosion on the fells amounting to about 3cm (1.2in) per year.

He also pointed to a rise in organic carbon being found in water as a result of peat being washed into rivers, and increased sedimentation being found in lake basins.

The answer "theoretically" would be to stop grazing which would allow vegetation and blanket bog – the "carbon store in the landscape"- to recover and "lock up the water that stops flooding being transferred to the valley bases".

"We see small-scale restoration attempts being undertaken where they just exclude grazing animals and it’s very, very successful", he said.

"But the scale we need to do that on is really quite substantial, and for an area that depends on upland farming that’s never going to be a popular thing to do."

Sarah Chaplain-Bryce, who runs Low Bridge End Farm, near Keswick, has planted a forest in which she plans to graze sheep in an attempt to produce carbon-neutral meat.

She said: "We are absolutely passionate [about the environment] and we don’t fertilise because we’re environmentally driven, but we’ve all got to eat.

"If you take farming away where’s your food going to come from? I don’t think you can have a blanket policy – a one-size-fits-all doesn’t work."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-51183134

So, what about these “droughts and storms” that were supposedly caused by climate change?

There has only been one notably dry summer in recent years, 2018. But that was only the 9th driest in the North West since records started in 1873. The driest summer was 1976, and other drier summers also occurred in 1887, 1949 and 1955.

I have also charted spring and summer rainfall together, and a similar pattern emerges:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html

So, clearly the drought followed by storms argument soon falls by the wayside, as the following winter of 2018/19 was relatively dry.

As for “devastating storms”, the only one in recent years was Storm Desmond in December 2015. This certainly was an exceptional storm, though by no means unprecedented. The storms in 1897 and 1898, for instance, were of similar intensity.

If we look at the wettest months in the North West, while Desmond stands out as the wettest, this appears to be an outlier, with no obvious trends in the rest of the data:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/download.html

As a final check, we can look at daily rainfall data back to 1906 for Newton Rigg, on the edge of the Lake District. (Data runs up to 2017).

https://climexp.knmi.nl/gdcnprcp.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&WMO=UKE00105860&STATION=NEWTON_RIGG&extraargs=

Again there is absolutely no evidence to show that climate change has made rainfall more extreme. The wettest day was actually in 1930.

The idea anyway that the Lake District, which has changed little for thousands of years and survived much warmer periods and the Little Ice Age, is now falling to pieces because of “climate change” is laughable.

If soil erosion really is a problem, it is tourism that is responsible. Indeed, millions of pounds are being spent to protect overused walking paths.

Erosion of peatlands is actually quite a serious problem across the UK, and there are many causes, none of them climate related – industrial pollution, sheep farming, drainage, tourism, peat extraction, construction of wind turbines and associated infrastructure, burning of peatland.

Just up the road from us is Bleaklow, where there has been a project ongoing for the last few years, aimed at restoring the moorland. I have observed it going on for a while now. There is a description of the project below:

Introduction Led by the Moors for the Future Partnership, the MoorLIFE moorland restoration project aimed to restore 800 ha of Bleaklow to the healthy wet bog it should be. The MoorLIFE project was made possible by a £5.5m grant from the European Union’s LIFE+ programme. Protecting active blanket bog by restoring bare and eroding peat in the South Pennines Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Special Protection Area (SPA) was key to its success. Description Owned by National Trust, United Utilities and Woodhead Estate, Bleaklow covers 5,400 ha and is situated between Glossop and the Longdendale and Upper Derwent valleys. It includes Bleaklow Head, which at 633 metres above sea level, is the second highest plateau in the Peak District. The Bleaklow landscape is an extraordinary one; hectare after hectare of moorland was stripped of almost all vegetation, showing nothing more than bare black peat before the MoorLIFE project took it under restoration management. Bleaklow can be accessed from the Snake Pass or Woodhead Pass and lies on the Pennine Way and above the Trans-Pennine Trail. Restoration Delivered Bare peat areas on the site have been re-stabilised by installing 52 km’s of geotextiles and helicoptering in 11,000 bags of heather cuttings (brash) and spreading them, to re-establish plant growth. To kick-start the re-vegetation process, 1,900 tonnes of lime and fertiliser was applied and 22 tonnes of grass and heather seeds sown. Additionally, 150,000 moorland plants such as bilberry and cotton grass were introduced, as well as a futher 30,000 plug plants and 807 million fragment of Sphagnum. As part of the gully blocking exercise, 4,000 dams were installed. Site Activity The Moors for the Future Partnership project has come up with various ways of rewetting the bogs and giving them back a proper clothing of vegetation. Specially harvested heather ‘brash’ is spread on the peat, providing a protective blanket for grass seed to take root. Lime is put down, to try to neutralise the excessively acidic nature of the soil, caused by past atmospheric pollution. Helicopters are used to drop grass seed; gullies are blocked and geotextiles laid. The spongy Sphagnum moss – the sign of a healthy wet bog – is reintroduced along with native plug plants. Little by little, the bare surface of the moors around Bleaklow is turning green once again. Background Information Bleaklow and the surrounding area demonstrates the result of two centuries of airborne pollution carried over from the industrial areas to the west of the Pennines, combined with the effects of wild fires. Where you would expect to find healthy wet bogs complete with a wide variety of creeping shrubs and mosses, there is instead a desert-type environment. As Chris Dean of Moors for the Future states, “it is a situation which has to be changed”. It isn’t only the ecology which suffers when peat bogs dry out and crumble away. As well as storing incredible amounts of carbon, the drinking water for many of the big cities of northern England comes off Bleaklow and the neighbouring Pennine hills. However, treacle-coloured water carrying small particles of peat from degraded peatlands increases treatment costs for water companies and, as a result, for all of us. Bleaklow is just one of four MoorLIFE sites. The sites are Black Hill, Turley Holes and Rishworth Common. MoorLIFE’s scale and success is very much the result of partnership working. The project was co-ordinated by the Peak District National Park, delivered by Moors for the Future Partnership and co-funded by the European Commission’s Life+ Programme. Partners included Environment Agency, Natural England, National Trust, United Utilities and Yorkshire Water.

https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/projects/bleaklow-moorlife-project-0

It shows just what a complex issue peat restoration is. In this case, industrial pollution is blamed, as the moors lie down wind from Manchester.

Circumstances may slightly differ in the Lakes. But it is absurd to simply blame “climate change” for the problem there. Apart from anything else, this absolves the accusers from doing anything constructive about the real problems, which could possibly actually yield some results.

As is often the case with the BBC, the story revolves around a supposed scientific study, in this case by Dr Simon Carr, programme leader for geography at the University of Cumbria.

As Sherelle Jacobs intimated today, the mouth watering sums available to universities for anything related to “climate” are now corrupting genuine scientific research.

One wonders whether Dr Carr would have received a penny for his project, if it had not been linked to “climate change”.