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It’s sodding Tony Juniper again

One standout conclusion for me is that we need to have much more water in our environment. During the last 100 years, the UK has lost 90% of its wetlands. This has led to the drastic decline of wildlife and rendered the country more vulnerable to the effects of extreme conditions. Draining fens, desiccating peat bogs, drying floodplains and the claiming of coastal marshes has transformed how our land looks and works. Restoring some of those wetlands could deliver huge benefits.

Wetlands can help to keep rivers flowing, even when rain is scarce, thereby protecting the living, shimmering threads that bring life to the landscape. Water standing on the land also helps recharge the aquifers that underpin much of our public water supply. Holding more water in the environment through the restoration of wet ecosystems can reduce flood peaks and protect us from the misery of the flooding that periodically affects communities across the country.

No, that’s not the way it works.

If you’ve got a waterlogged landscape then lots of rain leads to all of the new rain draining off immediately. ‘Coz the land is already waterlogged, right?

If you’ve land which is already drained then at least some of that excessive rain sinks into the landscape – ‘coz it’s not already waterlogged, right? – reducing the amount which then roars through the rivers as floods.

Twat.

It’s also amusing to think of the next bit. So, the response to warming, where the mosquito and malaria might return, is to deliberately create millions of acres of standing water, is it?

Double fucking twatto.

33 thoughts on “It’s sodding Tony Juniper again”

  1. The water in wetlands is useless. It’s in the wrong places ie the wet bits.

    Digging big deep holes and filling them with water in the dry bits is what is required.

  2. Harry Haddock's Ghost

    “There’s a bit of a food crisis Tony, people might starve, what shall we do?”

    “Let’s deliberately flood some of the most productive land in the world. That should sort it.”

  3. The fenlands were drained by the Victorians. The result? More farmland. So Tony wants to have fewer farms then.

  4. “Wetlands also emit lots of methane”

    Cover them with a gigantic plastic sheet and capture the gas, which can then be burned in a power station*. Gotta be better than cutting down trees in America, converting them to pellets and shipping them all the way to Drax…

    * O.K. there’s a degree of cynicism here.

  5. Malaria is a herd disease. It was endemic in England in the 16th to 19th centuries, and is thought to have been the cause of death of King James, he of the Bible. This period coincides with the Little Ice Age, which Wiki hasn’t got around to deleting yet.

    If there are no carriers of the malaria parasite, all the zillions of bloodsucking mozzies can bite as many humans as they like without transmitting the disease. Finland frog zample is mosquito heaven and their malaria incidence is low to non-existent.

  6. He’s not entirely wrong. Drainage schemes do what they’re intended to & dump rainfall into the rivers. Which overload & cause temporary flooding. Then in dry spells water levels in the rivers shrink. There’s no longer the steady protracted drainage that wetlands provide.
    “If you’ve got a waterlogged landscape then lots of rain leads to all of the new rain draining off immediately.” Not really what happens. You’ve a waterlogged landscape because water doesn’t drain off immediately. Adding a few inches on top doesn’t make much difference. Area. A couple of inches over several square miles is a helluva lot of water. And it’s already waterlogged so you aren’t using it for anything critical, so it’s not much of a problem.
    Incidentally, & I imagine Jim would confirm this, dry land does shed water much faster. It’s a phenomenon you see with summer downpours. The topsoil bakes hard & the rain just runs straight off. Go back the next day & it’s a dry as a bone. Think about mopping up a spill in the kitchen. You do it with a well wrung out wet cloth, don’t you? I dry one doesn’t pick much liquid until it’s wet. Just moves it about.

  7. “If you’ve got a waterlogged landscape then lots of rain leads to all of the new rain draining off immediately. ‘Coz the land is already waterlogged, right?

    If you’ve land which is already drained then at least some of that excessive rain sinks into the landscape – ‘coz it’s not already waterlogged, right? – reducing the amount which then roars through the rivers as floods.”

    Correct. One of the reasons we seem to be getting more floods in the UK these days is because farm drainage has been largely ignored since the 1980s. Up to that point there were grants for draining farm land, and as farming was more profitable due to the nature of the CAP, a greater incentive for farmers to use drainage to create more productive land, and to maintain existing systems. Since then however the thrust of CAP (and now post Brexit UK) farming policy has been to remove subsidies coupled to production, and to encourage farmers to take land out of production for environmental reasons. Thus farming became less profitable, so paying for drainage work out of ones own pocket was less affordable, and the incentive to merely remove damp land from production under environmental schemes far higher.

    Thus we have arrived at a position where the UK countryside has very dilapidated drainage, and often it works not at all. Land merely becomes sodden in winter and (maybe) dries out in summer, and the farming is worked in around this cycle. Thus if one gets a period of sustained rain in the latter part of winter, or early spring, when the land is already sodden, that water just flows immediately into rivers, resulting in the floods we have seen repeatedly in the last 10 years. A process that has been exacerbated of course by the State’s refusal to dredge main rivers, also on environmental grounds.

  8. If you’ve land which is already drained then at least some of that excessive rain sinks into the landscape – ‘coz it’s not already waterlogged, right? – reducing the amount which then roars through the rivers as floods.

    People who live in mostly bone dry environments will disagree with you. Water doesn’t soak into ground that isn’t used to absorbing water, it just runs off and, if there’s a lot of rain, quickly forms massive floods. In dry times it’s tempting to look at vast desert wadis and think they are some ancient landform from a wetter era, like on Mars. But given a heavy monsoon those wadis are full of raging water. Then empty in a day or two, and after a couple of weeks or so bone dry again.

    There’s some sense behind what some of Juniper is saying, but he’s opportunistically hobbyhorsing. Re-marshing the fens won’t make the slightest difference to inland water issues. Returning river flood plains to their natural state will.

  9. Southerner @ 09.20, unfortunately as we have found with Tuberculosis and now Polio, we probably DO have a significant number of carriers in the UK. We just don’t know it yet………

  10. “Incidentally, & I imagine Jim would confirm this, dry land does shed water much faster. It’s a phenomenon you see with summer downpours. The topsoil bakes hard & the rain just runs straight off. Go back the next day & it’s a dry as a bone. Think about mopping up a spill in the kitchen. You do it with a well wrung out wet cloth, don’t you? I dry one doesn’t pick much liquid until it’s wet. Just moves it about.”

    Not really. I have never known floods to occur when the ground has been very dry. Yes water may run off slightly quicker in such circumstances, but the general state of the river system will be massively under capacity in a very dry spell, so they have a huge capacity to take water in those circumstances. We in the UK get floods when there has been a prolonged period of slightly above average rainfall (a wet winter say) that is then followed by a a high rainfall event (ie when it rains solidly for a week). In such circumstances the capacity of the land to absorb water is zero, because the steady rainfall over a period of months has not been matched by the capacity of the drainage system to dump that rain into the rivers (when they could have coped with it) and thus when the heavy rain hits saturated land it flows off into already full rivers in hours.

    I remember well the floods of July 2007 in southern UK, we had had a very wet spring and summer up to that point and the ground was already unseasonably wet. We then had torrential rain for about 12 hours, and within that time the water was already flooding places I had never seen flood before. It literally had nowhere to go – it came straight off the fields, into the usual streams which were backed up because the main rivers were backed up and just spread at low points everywhere.

    Its the sponge effect – keep wringing it out regularly and you can then dump a decent amount of water into it without it going everywhere, allow it to become saturated and then any more water poured on will just spill everywhere around it.

  11. Surely that’s about what he’s saying Jim. One accepts that surplus rainfall will flood low points & plan for that. It’s certainly what the French seem to do.

  12. ” One accepts that surplus rainfall will flood low points & plan for that. ”

    But its not necessary for ‘surplus’ rainfall to flood anywhere, other than in very extreme circumstances. A well maintained drainage system will keep the land in a condition that will cope with sudden deluges. Neglecting the drainage system may indeed slow the flow of rain to rivers, but at the cost of eventually resulting in soaked land. That soaked land is then extremely liable to flash flood, if you get heavy (but not extreme) rainfall.

  13. @Jim earlier
    Up to that point there were grants for draining farm land,
    And there you have it. Farmers wish to raise the utility of their land & expect to paid to do so.

  14. I’d be all in favour of re-wetting the Fenlands, or a part of them.

    Ely under 5m of water for example

  15. “And there you have it. Farmers wish to raise the utility of their land & expect to paid to do so.”

    Not at all. Farmers manage with poor and dilapidated drainage systems, they can do the sums as to whether they will benefit from any given scheme. Which by and large they won’t, so they do the bare minimum to keep the land farmable. The point is that there is a public benefit to a comprehensive and well functioning land drainage system, and it would seem sensible to spend money on helping landowners create that, rather than just throwing billions at flood defences to cope with water once its already got out of control. The UK government spends several billions on flood defences, if a fraction of that was provided as grants to landowners (who would be paying at least half as well) to drain land and improve their drainage generally, this would flow through into benefits for the public in less largescale flooding events.

  16. @BiS We do. Mostly.

    But then again… there isn’t anything “natural” about the dutch landscape. Hasn’t been in places since roughly the Roman Era. Most definitely not since about 17thC.
    And it’s all managed by a separate governmental institute directly under the Crown, with even their own taxation rights.
    Politicians cannot touch it, which is mostly why it works.

    Can’t see that happen in the UK.

  17. Incidentally, a major reason we’re getting those two new nukes is because Rijkswaterstaat nicely informed the Greenies that come the brownouts/blackouts having no light is the least of their worries…

    The pumps would stop working as well….

    And Greenie Central is well below sea level….

  18. Big fuss over the Sumas Plain outside Vancouver flooding last year to the point that it cut off all road and rail transport links.
    Except Sumas Plain used to be Sumas Lake and it was drained and turned into farmland, there was also warnings for over a decade about not maintaining flood defences.
    It really upset the greenies that this wasn’t climate change as the lake was the natural state in the first place.

  19. @PJF
    “People who live in mostly bone dry environments”

    Which is diversion and irrelevent as Jupiter is talking about cool, temperate, wet UK

    Similar to @bis – UK not Spain

    @Jim
    +1

  20. Which is diversion and irrelevent as Jupiter is talking about cool, temperate, wet UK
    It isn’t always.
    Seen this play out in Essex. Short but torrential downpour. Lasted about 20 minutes. It looked like there was actually standing water on the hillside That immediately ran off & flooded the road 3 foot deep. (Up to the windows of a car got stuck in it)
    Why?
    Late summer. Ground baked hard. The stream at the bottom of the hill had been culverted but couldn’t take the flow.
    That land at the bottom of the hill would originally been waterlogged for much of the year. If there was a road there, it would have been known to be unusable at times. But now it’s been drained for arable rather than livestock grazing. A road’s been built which has become a busy traffic route. The roads run on the high ground are hardly used. Instead of being contained there, the rainfall quickly dumps itself into the river which was already up to the underneath of the bridge when crossed it.
    Sure, you can engineer the landscape. But there are consequences as well as benefits. Probably more by luck than judgement that a developer hadn’t built an estate down there. Might only happen once in 30 years, but that’d provide little reassurance to someone up to their waist in raw sewage.
    Eventually you’re current heatwave is going to break. That’s usually accompanied by downpours rather than drizzle. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
    Spanish seem to be rather better at this than the Brits. Town I’m in has three riverbeds run across it. About a 100 ft wide banked up 15 ft. Generally they’re as dry as a bone. Two days a year they run 10ft deep.

  21. ‘And Greenie Central is well below sea level….’

    Thank you Grikath!!! So the direct threat of drowning will actually work on Greens.

    I must remember this.

  22. @bis

    Shame no resovoirs to store the water or dredged rivers to send back to sea

    Instead whole of UK must be punished for something that might happen in one localitiy once in 30 years?

    No, freak events happen, live with it if you decided to live there

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