Has a Warming Russia Outpaced the World?

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF, Green Inc., The New York Times, August 2010

 

Associated Press. Firefighters sought Friday to halt a wildfire near Murmino, Russia, 110 miles southeast of Moscow.

 

Better known for long, bitterly cold winters, Russia is well on the way to becoming the poster child for the perils of global warming this summer.

On Thursday, the mercury hit 100 degrees in Moscow, the hottest day since record-keeping began in 1880; it was the fourth day in a week that the city set a temperature record. Highs for July and August typically average in the low-to-mid 70s.

The heat stoked wildfires that continue to burn out of control and have overwhelmed the country’s firefighters, while an unparalleled drought withered crops so severely that Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin took the radical step of banning all grain exports. Smoke from the fires has turned the Moscow air into a thick, toxic soup.

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, blamed the crisis on climate change and called for action.

“What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate,” Mr. Medvedev said recently.

One extreme heat wave or drought, of course, is not definitive proof of climate change.

Yet the heat-induced disaster may come as little surprise to Russian climate scientists, who have warned for years that the country is experiencing rapid warming that will only accelerate over the course of the 21st century. Drawing on the work of leading climate researchers, a 2008 report compiled by Russia’s state environmental agency concluded that Russia was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and experienced an average temperature increase of about 2.1 °F over the course of the 20th century.

“Most of Russia is located in the area of considerable observed and projected climate change,” the report states.

The report found that the work of Russian scientists “agreed well” with a comprehensive 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which urged all nations to take action to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. “With high confidence one can claim that since the middle of the 20th century the observed growth of the concentration of anthropogenic greenhouse gases has stipulated the largest portion of global warming,” it concluded.

Proof of warming is widespread across Russia. Glaciers and Arctic sea ice have dwindled, and as many as 385,000 square miles of Siberian tundra are thawing.

Wildfires have also been on the rise for decades, a trend that scientists expect to accelerate as temperatures continue to rise in coming decades.

Link:  http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/has-a-warming-russia-outpaced-the-world/