Climate Change Anecdotes

Someone on the radio just observed that the amount of money earmarked for vulnerable nations in the COP28 deal is less than what the Los Angeles Dodgers have earmarked for Shohei Ohtani.
 
Last Year’s Global Temperature Set a Record
BY ERIC NIILER

The record global temperatures that spawned heavy rainfall, disastrous floods and raging wildfires in 2023 will likely continue in 2024, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The service is the first analysis to declare—after months of speculation—that 2023 was the hottest year since record-keeping began in the mid-1800s.

2023’s global average temperature, the study found, was 14.98 degrees Celsius, or 58.96 degrees Fahrenheit. That average was 1.48 degrees C, or 2.66 degrees F, hotter than the preindustrial baseline, creeping ever closer to the 1.5 degrees C threshold the world’s nations have agreed to keep warming below to avoid the worst effects of climate change. “The extremes we have observed over the last few months provide a dramatic testimony of how far we now are from the climate in which our civilization developed,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus service. The record temperatures were caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions and by the ocean releasing heat to the atmosphere for the past three years during the La Niña ocean circulation pattern, according to the Copernicus report.
“We had the suppression for three years in a row,” said Sarah Kapnick, NOAA’s chief scientist. “And then suddenly all this heat was released through these marine heat waves around the world.”

Not every storm or heat wave is caused by climate change, and not every city, state or country hit record temperatures in 2023. However, climate scientists say that rising global temperatures increase the likelihood of more periods of heavy rainfall, more heat waves more droughts and more wildfires. The Copernicus report found that each month from June to December in 2023 was warmer than the same month in any previous year. It is likely that a 12-month period ending in January or February 2024 will exceed 1.5 degrees C above the preindustrial levels, according to the report. Across the continental U.S., 2023 ranked as the fifth warmest year since records began in 1895, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi and New Hampshire recorded their hottest average year, while Maryland and Florida reached their highest maximum temperatures.

As the temperatures rose in 2023, wildfires fueled by heat and drought drove thousands of people from their homes and spewed harmful smoke hundreds of miles from the flames. In August, dry weather and strong winds from Hurricane Dora fueled the deadliest U.S. fire in over a century, killing 100 people and destroying much of the historic town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. In Canada, wildfires scorched more than 45 million acres from May to October, above the previous record of 17.5 million acres, according to Canadian government figures. A total of 240,000 residents from nearly 300 communities were evacuated during the wildfire season. “The warmer the atmosphere, the more efficient the atmosphere is in sucking the moisture out of dead vegetation on the forest floor,” said Michael Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. “The drier the fuel, the easier it is for a fire to start and spread.” Smoke from Canada’s wildfires drifted south across the Northeastern U.S. and Midwest this past summer.

Extreme heat fueled fires in northern and central Greece, killing at least 21 people, and burning 312 square miles in late August and early September, the biggest wildfire this century in Europe. Powerful rain events also created havoc across many parts of the globe. A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, seeding stronger rain storms, according to Jonathan M. Winter, associate professor of geography at Dartmouth College. “We have a warmer ocean, so that can give storms more fuel, more water vapor and more liquid to work with” as the ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere, Winter said.

Between Dec. 26, 2022, and Jan. 17, 2023, San Francisco received 17.6 inches of rain, while nearby Oakland set a 23day rainfall record with 18.3 inches. The storms destroyed homes and businesses and cost the lives of 17 people across California, according to a Jan. 11 statement by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

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On April 12, Fort Lauder-dale, Fla., was drenched with 25 inches of rain, flooding streets and homes and closing the city’s airport. In mid-July, catastrophic flooding occurred across much of Vermont, washing out roads and bridges, putting the capital of Montpelier under several feet of water and damaging thousands of homes and businesses, according to NOAA. The highest 48-hour rainfall total was 9.20 inches in Calais, Vt.

In September, Storm Daniel swept through Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before hitting northeastern Libya. Al-Bayda, Libya, recorded 16.3 inches of rainfall in 24 hours. On Dec. 18 and 19, parts of New England, including Maine, received as much as 8 inches of rain that caused severe flooding, damage and power outages and killed five people across the Northeast.

If El Niño, the pattern that causes the eastern Pacific Ocean to warm, continues as expected, global atmospheric temperatures will likely remain well above normal in 2024, according to Kristopher Karnauskas, associate professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
 

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We just had about the fourth storm that probably would have been snow in the 90s.
 
On the radio this morning, I learned that traffic through the Panama Canal is slowed to about 2/3rds normal, owing to droughts in the lakes that feed the canal's locks.

On the radio right now is a show about Utah's Great Salt Lake, which is drying out so fast, it could be gone in 5 years.
 

'You're kind of stuck': Northern Ontario's most southern ice road may not open this winter​

Winter roads connecting James Bay communities to each other and to the south still not open​

It is definitely winter in northern Ontario, but winter road season has still not arrived.

And on Lake Temagami, there are fears that, for the first time ever, the ice road won't open at all this year.

"I've been having the talk with people in the community about how we've got to just get used to the snow machine ride again, and this is probably how we are going across the lake this winter," said David McKenzie, executive director of Temagami First Nation.

"I don't think we are going to have the ice road unfortunately."

About 245 people live on Bear Island in the middle of the lake, and during the winter, they depend on the ice road for getting back and forth to the mainland for everything from doctor's appointments, to groceries to employment.

McKenzie said they need about 25 cm of ice for it to be safe for cars and trucks, but right now, there are spots of "very questionable ice" on the lake with only five centimetres.

The snowmobile path across the lake is open with a thickness between 15 and 22 centimetres, but McKenzie said it only opened in early January, when that usually happens before Christmas.

The First Nation is offering a snowmobile shuttle service, where passengers ride in a sleigh pulled behind a snow machine, but it can be a cold, bumpy ride.

"I think it also even transitions down to some of the mental health of the community members as well. There's a feeling that you're kind of stuck up here," McKenzie said.

"It just impacts us in a variety of ways."

The thousands of people who live on Ontario's James Bay Coast are also dealing with a shorter driving season every winter.

The James Bay ice road running between Moosonee and Attawapiskat, as well as the Wetum winter road connecting Moose Factory with the provincial highway system in the south, are still not ready for traffic with a week to go in January.

There has long been debate about building a permanent all-season road to the coast, but aside from a very long bridge, there are not many possible solutions on Lake Temagami.

"It's a real change, and we've just got to put our heads and think up some workable solutions," McKenzie said.

"We're one of the more southern ice roads. We're kind of a harbinger of things to come and things that are here now."

'Connect those communities'​

It's no surprise the construction of ice roads is delayed for many Indigenous communities for Sudbury researcher David Pearson.

Pearson, an emeritus professor at Laurentian University, receives regular updates from Indigenous Services Canada about the winter road season for communities in Ontario's far north.

He said many communities that depend on winter roads haven't been able to build them yet.

"In fact, the overall winter road season has been decreasing for about half a day a year for the last 20 years," he said.

"So by the end of the century, by 2100, the winter road season for northern communities who rely on an ice road in the winter, will be about three to four weeks shorter."

Pearson said there is a more permanent solution available.

"The only thing that can be done, and it would be very expensive, and we're talking about hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, is to connect those communities with what we call all-weather roads," he said.

"In other words, what we in our part of Ontario and southern Ontario, we call roads."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/ice-roads-northern-ontario-temagami-bear-island-1.7091021
 
Biden pauses LNG export approvals after pressure from climate activists

I think this is pretty big news, we are recognising how much damage long distance LNG transport is doing and actually taking action now.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday paused approvals for pending and future applications to export liquefied natural gas (LNG)from new projects, a move cheered by climate activists that could delay decisions on new plants until after the Nov. 5 election.

The Department of Energy (DOE) will conduct a review during the pause that will look at the economic and environmental impacts of projects seeking approval to export LNG to Europe and Asia where the fuel is in hot demand.

The review will take months and then will be open to public comment which will take more time, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters in a teleconference.

Biden said in a statement: "During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America's energy security, and our environment."

The pause "sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time," said Biden, a Democrat.​
 
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About 3/4 of January was warm here, although the other 1/4 was pretty cold (5-10 degrees Fahrenheit). Certainly a warmer than average winter thus far though, with lots of precipitation but the vast majority of that being rain. My friends who are better-versed in weather say this is typical of an El Nino year, which means something about the temperatures and weather patterns over the Pacific in the autumn.

February is thus starting off warm as well, although it's supposed to cool off again in a week or so, with a decent amount of below-freezing weather.

-----

I have traditionally been in the "mixed feelings" camp with LNG exports, the thinking being that if it's offsetting coal rather than wind/solar/nuclear, it's a net positive, and that it's also a net positive from a security perspective when it helps Europe and other parts of the world not be dependent on Russian natural gas exports. But reading the abstract of that paper, it's interesting to see that perhaps the "fewer emissions than coal" assumption is not correct for LNG exports (while it still is for domestically consumed natural gas). The key line being:

Samson's Peer-Reviewed Article said:
Total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 27% to 2‐fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.
Click to expand...

With methane emissions being a significant contributor to that, especially for the older tankers that don't capture it and are at the high end of the range.

I think the question of, "is Europe going to freeze if we pause LNG exports and 2024-2025 is a very cold winter in most of Europe?" is still an important one, but the pause and evaluation seems appropriate given that it may be worse than coal and the paused projects would likely not be in time for the next winter anyway.
 
Does this count as an anecdote?

greenhouse_effect_2x.png

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).
 
The world has warmed 1.5 °C, according to 300-year-old sponges

The planet has already passed 1.5 °C of warming, according to a new measuring technique that goes back further in time than current methods. At the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, nations agreed not to exceed 1.5 °C, a guardrail of climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses a baseline for pre-industrial global mean temperatures that reference the earliest global instrumental temperature records. This period is around 1850–1900, when the first ship-based records of sea-surface temperatures became available.

However, McCulloch says that long-lived marine sponges can provide indications of temperature as far back as the eighteenth century. He and his colleagues analysed the ratio of the elements strontium to calcium in the 300-year-old calcium carbonate skeletons of a coral-like species of sponge, Ceratoporella nicholsoni, that grows off the coasts of Puerto Rico. This ratio changes only with changes in water temperature, making it a proxy thermometer, according to the study published in Nature Climate Change today1.

The sponges were sampled from one particular section in the Caribbean — the only place that they are found. They were collected at a depth of 33–91 metres, in what’s called the ocean mixed layer. “Sea-surface temperature can be highly variable on top,” says McCulloch. “But this mixed layer represents the whole system down to a couple hundred metres, and it’s in equilibrium with the temperatures in the atmosphere.”

The arm of the Caribbean that the sponges grow in is also relatively sheltered from big ocean currents and climate cycles, such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and El Niño Southern Oscillation, which means that it experiences less variability in water temperatures than other ocean regions.

The sponge skeletons suggest that the planet started to warm up in the mid-1860s, during the period currently defined as the pre-industrial baseline.

“The baseline is where we measure our current temperatures from, so when we say 1.5 [degrees of warming], it’s to do with this reference point,” says McCulloch.

During the relatively stable period of 1700–1860, global sea-surface temperatures varied by less than 0.2 °C — with the notable exception of brief cooler periods attributed to volcanic eruptions.

Using this earlier period as the pre-industrial baseline, McCulloch and colleagues calculated that global temperatures had in fact increased by 0.5 °C more than what was estimated by the IPCC. “That’s a huge difference relative to the total amount of warming,” says McCulloch. Furthermore, the planet exceeded 1.5 °C of warming by around 2010–2012, and is on track to surpass 2 °C in the next few years.

d41586-024-00281-8_26700506.jpg

A coral-like sponge, Ceratoporella nicholsoni
 

World's first year-long breach of key 1.5C warming limit​

For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts.

This first year-long breach doesn't break that landmark 'Paris agreement', but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists say.

"To go over [1.5C of warming] on an annual average is significant," says Prof Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society.

"It's another step in the wrong direction. But we know what we've got to do."

Limiting long-term warming to 1.5C above "pre-industrial" levels - before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels - has become a key symbol of international efforts to tackle climate change.

A landmark UN report in 2018 said that the risks from climate change - such as intense heatwaves, rising sea-levels and loss of wildlife - were much higher at 2C of warming than at 1.5C.

But temperatures have kept rising at a concerning pace, data from the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service from the past year shows, illustrated in the graph below. The period from February 2023 to January 2024 reached 1.52C of warming.

This year-long breach is no major surprise. January was the eighth record warm month in a row.

In fact, one science group, Berkeley Earth, says that the calendar year 2023 was more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Other science bodies, such as Nasa, put the past 12 months slightly below 1.5C of warming.

These small differences are mainly due to the way global temperatures are estimated for the late 1800s, when measurements were more sparse.

But all the major datasets agree on the recent warming trajectory and that the world is in by far its warmest period since modern records began - and likely for much longer.

And the world's sea surface is also at its highest ever recorded average temperature - yet another sign of the widespread nature of climate records. As the chart below shows, it's particularly notable given that ocean temperatures don't normally peak for another month or so.

Why has 1.5C been broken over the past year?​

The long-term warming trend is unquestionably being driven by human activities - mainly from burning fossil fuels, which releases planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide. This is also responsible for the vast majority of the warmth over the past year.

In recent months, a natural climate-warming phenomenon known as El Niño has also given air temperatures an extra boost, although it would typically only do so by about 0.2C.

Global average air temperatures began exceeding 1.5C of warming on an almost daily basis in the second half of 2023, when El Niño began kicking in, and this has continued into 2024. This is shown where the red line is above the dashed line in the graph below.

An end to El Niño conditions is expected in a few months, which could allow global temperatures to temporarily stabilise, and then fall slightly, probably back below the 1.5C threshold.

But human activities mean temperatures will ultimately continue rising in the decades ahead, unless urgent action is taken.

"Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures increasing," concludes Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of Copernicus.

Can we still limit global warming?​

At the current rate of emissions, the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5C as a long-term average - rather than a single year - could be crossed within the next decade.

This would be a hugely symbolic milestone, but researchers say it wouldn't mark a climate cliff edge.

"It's not a threshold beyond which climate change will spin out of control," says Prof Myles Allen of the University of Oxford and Gresham College, and a lead author of the UN's landmark 2018 report.

The impacts of climate change would continue to accelerate, however - something that the extreme heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods over the past 12 months have given us a taste of.

"Every tenth of a degree of warming causes more harm than the last one," Prof Allen adds.

An extra half a degree - the difference between 1.5C and 2C of global warming - also greatly increases the risks of passing "tipping points".

These are thresholds within the climate system which, if crossed, could lead to rapid and potentially irreversible changes.

For example, if the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets passed a tipping point, their potentially runaway collapse would cause "catastrophic" rises to global sea-levels over the centuries that followed, Prof Bentley says.

But researchers are keen to emphasise that humans can still make a difference to the world's warming trajectory.

The world has made some progress, with green technologies like renewables and electric vehicles booming in many parts of the world.

This has meant some of the very worst case scenarios of 4C warming or more this century - thought possible a decade ago - are now considered much less likely, based on current policies and pledges.

And perhaps most encouragingly of all, it's still thought that the world will more or less stop warming once net zero carbon emissions are reached. Effectively halving emissions this decade is seen as particularly crucial.

"That means we can ultimately control how much warming the world experiences, based on our choices as a society, and as a planet," says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at US group Berkeley Earth.

"Doom is not inevitable."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68110310
 
We are not going to save the world by growing trees and burning them shocker. I guess the real shocker is how such an idea got so much traction. They are doing that with the Drax in Yorkshire, and they put virgin Canadian forest through it, so that sounds really good for the environment.

I think it should be the law that papers as important to everyone shoudl be available to everyone, bloody paywalls. This is the abstract and little of the content from the below youtube.

Many governments and industries are relying on future large-scale, land-based carbon dioxide (CO2) removal (CDR) to avoid making necessary steep greenhouse gas (GHG) emission cuts today. Not only does this risk locking us into a high overshoot above 1.5°C, but it will also increase biodiversity loss, imperiling the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) goals. Such CDR deployments also pose major economic, technological, and social feasibility challenges; threaten food security and human rights; and risk overstepping multiple planetary boundaries, with potentially irreversible consequences. We propose three ways to build on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) analyses of CDR mitigation potential by assessing sustainability risks associated with land-use change and biodiversity loss: estimate the sustainable CDR budget based on socioecological thresholds; identify viable mitigation pathways that do not overstep these thresholds; and reframe governance around allocating limited CDR supply to the most legitimate uses.

The authors then estimate that this would, quote:“require converting up to 29 million square kilometres of land—over three times the area of the United States—to bioenergy crops or trees, and potentially push over 300 million people into food insecurity” end quote.

Spoiler Youtube reference :
 
Mexico City is running significantly short on water:

Climate change has made droughts increasingly severe due to the lack of water,” said UNAM’s Sarmiento. Added to this, high temperatures “have caused the water that is available in the Cutzamala system to evaporate.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

One official stated Day Zero (when they run out of water) could come as soon as June 26th, however then state media stepped in and said there would be no Day Zero.
 
Energy industry methane emissions rise close to record in 2023

Methane emissions from the energy sector approached record highs last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned.

In a report released on Wednesday, the global watchdog said the fossil fuel industry’s emissions of the potent greenhouse gas, responsible for about 30 percent of global warming, reached more than 120 million metric tonnes in 2023. That put emissions close to the record set in 2019, despite the sector having promised to use freely available technology to reduce their levels.

Despite pledges made by the oil and gas industry to bring down large-scale emission spikes by plugging infrastructure leaks, they jumped by 50 percent last year compared with 2022. One disastrous well blowout in Kazakhstan, recorded by satellites, lasted more than 200 days.

The increase also came despite the availability of technology capable of curbing pollution at virtually no cost, said the Paris-based agency. Some 40 percent of the emissions recorded in 2023 “could have been avoided at no net cost” using tried and tested methods, said IEA energy expert Christophe McGlade.

Two-thirds of the emissions in 2023 were from just 10 countries, including China’s coal industry and the United States’ gas sector, with Russia not far behind.

BriHswB.png
 
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There is a new paper about the ocean circulation tipping point, where the weather in northern europe will get colder when much of the rest of the world gets hotter. They reckon it will be irrevesible by 4 C warming. They interpret that to mean we should start geoengineering soon, which seems a bit of a leap.
Spoiler Youtube reference :
 
There are a handful of "ghost towns" across the U.S. Some were home to indigenous populations. Some are related to the "boom & bust" cycle of people seeking riches as European settlers spread East-to-West from the late 18th Century. Some have stranger stories, such as Centralia, PA, where a coal seam caught fire in 1962 (it continues to burn, and will probably keep burning for the next couple of hundred years). I don't know how many towns have been abandoned because of man-made climate change, but I'd guess we're going to start seeing it happen.

www.nbcnews.com

Battered by hurricanes and tired of rebuilding, 90% of population has left this coastal town

The consequences of climate change are already taking a toll on some U.S. communities. In Cameron, Louisiana, hope comes from a natural gas plant that activists call a "carbon bomb."
www.nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com

NBC News said:
Fewer than 200 people remain in what was once a bustling community with almost 2,000 residents. Before the storms [4 hurricanes in 15 years*], there were grocery stores, hardware shops, several restaurants and bars, and a functioning hospital.

Now, Anchors Up Grill and a gas station mart provide the only food for purchase in Cameron. Locals buy their groceries in bulk once a week from Lake Charles, and a medical emergency could mean a death sentence, with the nearest hospital located 1 hour away.

Cameron Parish, which encompasses the town of Cameron, has lost more than half of its population. The storms have left the region with millions of dollars in damages and little capacity to rebuild. Some in the community say that the hurricanes are getting stronger and that climate change is to blame.

“We didn’t have a hurricane for 50 years, and then all of a sudden we had two in the last 15 years that wiped us out completely,” Smith said. “And they’re not little storms. They’re bad.”
Click to expand...


* Hurricane Rita, Category 3, 2005.
Hurricane Ike, Category 2, 2008.
Hurricane Laura, Category 4, tied for strongest hurricane to hit Louisiana, August 2020.
Hurricane Delta, Category 2 and the 4th named storm to hit Louisiana that year, October 2020.
 
Johnson said he doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change, but he does believe that the storms have gotten stronger and more destructive over the years. The proposed export terminal could help revive Cameron’s economy, he said.

“We grew up with pipelines in our backyard,” Johnson said. “The oil and gas industry was part of us. The project will be very good for the nation, very good for Louisiana, and very good for Cameron Parish.”
Click to expand...

Lol, lmao even
 
Mushrooms are bad for the environment now?

In a huge industrial shed on Leckford Estate, a farm owned by the supermarket Waitrose in a beautiful part of southern England, a revolution is stirring in the world of mushroom growing. UK production of this crop relies on peat, the incredibly carbon-rich organic matter found in bogs and fens across the country. Peatland contains so much carbon, it is sometimes described as “the UK’s rainforests”. That is why the UK government has promised to restore 280,000 hectares of peatland in England alone by 2050, to help meet its climate change goals.

Why are we using peat to grow mushrooms?

Around 60 years ago, UK growers realised that using peat instead of soil to grow mushrooms “massively improved” their yield, says Ralph Noble of horticulture company Microbiotech. Most button mushrooms are grown on a substrate of composted straw and animal manure, but to actually get the bit that we harvest and eat, the cap and stalk that comprise the fruiting body of the mushroom, you need a so-called casing layer on top of the substrate to make those fruiting bodies form. That is what the peat is used for. It is very good for the task because it holds a lot of water and has the ideal physical and biological properties that lead to fruiting bodies.

Spoiler Rest of article :
Why is that a problem?

Virtually all the mushrooms produced in the UK for consumption are grown this way. Noble says that the UK uses in the region of 100,000 cubic metres of peat a year for this purpose, or roughly a ninth of the peat extracted from UK landscapes annually. “It’s quite a significant use of peat,” says Noble. Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen in the UK says the peat used would release around 11,000 tonnes of CO2, after making some assumptions about the density of the material. Based on an average family car’s annual emissions, he says that means growing mushrooms in the UK is equivalent to the emissions of more than 2600 cars.

I still want mushrooms. What are the alternatives to peat?

“The challenge is finding a material that gives the same [mushroom] yield and quality as peat,” says Noble. His company is leading a consortium including Waitrose working on a £108,000 government-funded research project into peat-free casing materials. A leading contender is coir, a fibre from coconut husks. Other options being examined are powdered bark and composted plant material. A Dutch research team, led by Jan van der Wolf at Wageningen University and Research, found last year that grass fibres made with a patented process involving agricultural waste could be used.

What progress is being made?

Van der Wolf and his team were able to grow mushrooms in the grass fibres, and the resulting mushrooms looked no different to ones grown in peat. At Leckford Estate, the staff say they have successfully used coir in small tests to create mushroom spores, and this week they are in the process of putting it down across a whole bed to produce whole mushrooms. They say the big question that remains is yield, and whether swapping peat for coir would mean they can grow fewer mushrooms in the same shed. Noble is tight-lipped on the official results of the project, funded by Innovate UK, the country’s government-backed innovation agency, as he says they won’t be published until next year at the earliest.

The National Trust, a UK heritage and conservation charity, says that as part of its efforts to phase out peat, it has been searching for a supplier that can provide closed-cup mushrooms grown without peat. But so far it hasn’t found one that can do so at the scale required. In the meantime, the trust says it has decided to reduce the use of mushrooms at its 280 cafes.

What are the challenges for peat-free alternatives?

Scale is going to be an issue, judging from the National Trust’s experience. “It has to be something in abundance,” says Noble, and it is unclear whether there is enough coconut husks to fill that peat-shaped hole. The Leckford Estate staff, for their part, do think there is enough coir to go round. Another big issue is water retention: peat is very good at holding water, and plant-based compost and coir won’t hold as much. Mushrooms are about 95 per cent water, says Noble, and most of that moisture comes from the casing material. Another stumbling block is that peat doesn’t vary very much, so alternatives will need to mimic that uniformity to keep mushroom yields up.

Can’t we just carry on as we are?

The staff at Leckford Estate don’t think so: their search for peat-free mushroom production is part of a far wider commitment to shift the farm’s methods to limit its environmental impact. Moreover, regulation is coming. The UK government recently consulted on the idea of phasing out peat use in commercial horticulture by 2028, which would put an end date on how mushrooms are grown today, if adopted. That is still a big if until a final government decision. One fear Noble has is that mushroom production simply gets shifted to other countries that are less worried about the environmental impact, which is why developing alternatives is vital. “Using peat in general as a horticulture growing medium probably isn’t sustainable. There’s a lot of pressure on peat bogs,” he says. Smith salutes those researching peat-free alternatives. “Peatland is too precious to use for horticulture,” he says.
 
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