Discussion: Pat, Pet, PETA, Peat

It's not every day you look at the NY Times and see someone you know prominently mentioned and quoted. But today you can: there he is, Canada's Mike Waddington in "What's Green, Soggy and Fights Climate Change?". No, it's not Mike, but peat bogs, with Mike providing an explanation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/climate/peat-cl...

Awesome, Mike!

haha thanks Mikell. it’s always a pleasure being interviewed by Henry Fountain from the NY Times. A few years ago we toured him through one of our wildfire research sites in Alberta. Excellent journalist.

Nice work, peat researcher! I'd never thought of peat as being "Low Hanging Fruit".

I had more of a tough time with the UK press this week...

I enjoyed a peaty Bowmore yesterday if that counts.

Hopefully it was that part of the UK press for which attracting their ire is a badge of honour (but even when it is, it isn't a lot of fun to go through a couple of weeks where you get up each morning wondering what half-truths and untruths are going to be told about you and/or your work today).

Yes, I love seeing a headline with "peat" in it, and then scanning down the article... yep, Mike's there!

@blairtrewin. yup, that bit. Its quite scary when you read the Daily Mail and think, "that was one of the more accurate ones"

@graeme re: low hanging fruit. haha fair enough but from a carbon storage per hectare perspective peat restoration is hard to beat especially as it also protects degraded peatlands from wildfire carbon loss. blocking drainage ditches and gullies is rather straight forward. Scotland, as you may know, has an ambitious peatland restoration plan. I was supposed to join a research project in the flow country earlier this year (meaning more opportunities to orienteer in Scotland) but covid put that on hold.

perhaps we can all agree that when it comes to peat and low hanging fruit that the best approach is the use of sherry casks with a peated whisky. Any good suggestions? I need to add to my scotch collection. A fruity Benromach whisky I picked up from the Scottish 6 days many years ago is in need of replacing.

Laphroaig 10yrs

Good choice. That's part of my Islay collection.

Talisker 10yrs also good.

99% invisible podcast on peatlands and the issues of tree planting on Scottish peatlands

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/for-the-lov...

Balvenie Peat Week is also a lovely bottle.

Bloody Canadian Trees, coming over here, stealing our bogs ;). Also proved totally useless for orienteering - it was quite a surprise to me to see what impressive trees they can become in Canada, given enough time.

That weird tax break for tree planting seemed like a good idea, but had lots of bad consequences. Forestry in Scotland has got a lot less brutal now.