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Russia’s weather goes crazy
bne IntelIiNews
Russia’s weather has gone crazy. There is currently
a heatwave inside the Arctic Circle where the coast is hotter than Mediterranean beaches. And Moscow has just reported its warmest days in May ever, where temperatures soared to over 30% while the rest of Europe was suffering from a cold snap that has seen gas prices used for heating double this “spring.”
The situation follows on from the end of last year, when there was no snow until December. (It usually starts some time towards the end of September.) In short: nothing is normal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of ignoring the climate change issue and going slow on implementing Russia’s Paris Accord commitments, which the Russian government ratified in 2019.
However, after a string of environmental disasters last year, including the triggering of a federal emergency after mining giant Norilsk Nickel spilled over 20,000 tonnes of oil into
“Last summer was the hottest since record-keeping began, as towns that are usually still blanketed by snow experienced blazing heat, thanks to the escalating climate crisis”
Arctic rivers, and a once-in-a-1,000-year snow melt flooded the TGK1 power station near Murmansk, the Kremlin seems to have woken up to the fact that Russia’s permafrost is melting. As if to underline the point, there was a another large-scale oil spill this month by Russian company Lukoil.
Heatwave
This is not the first time that Russia has had a heatwave. Last summer was the hottest since record-keeping began, as towns that are usually still blanketed by snow experienced blazing heat, thanks to the escalating climate crisis.
In May it was hotter on the coast of the Arctic Circle than in the Mediterranean. Russia is heating up three times faster than the rest of the world.
On June 20 last year, the Weather and Climate weather portal recorded a temperature of 38C in Verkhoyansk in the Sakha Republic in the centre of Russia, the coldest town in the world with a record all-time low temperature of -67.8C.
Other places inside the Arctic Circle last year recorded tem- peratures rising to over 45C. Last year’s new 38C temperature was the highest temperature every recorded inside the Arctic Circle, meteorologists say. The previous record of 37.8C for the highest temperature ever experienced inside the Arctic Circle was set in Fort Yukon, Alaska, in June 1915, a record it shares with Verkhoyansk.
Verkhoyansk also holds the Guinness World Record for the highest recorded temperature range of 105C, with a fluctuation from minus 68C to a high of 37C, according to the Moscow Times.
This year’s polar region heat wave will only have the Kremlin more worried. It has long been known that temperatures in Russia are rising two and half times faster than they are in the rest of the world, but a new study out this year suggests that the rate has increased to three times faster than the rest of the world.
The alarming result was part of a report published on May 19 by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), which also warned of an increased risk of the region's iconic sea ice disappearing completely in summer, before reforming in winter.
And Russia’s melting permafrost is a ticking CO2 emissions time bomb. Currently the ground temperature is about -3C on average but this has been rising by about one degree per decade. Frozen into the vast wastes in Russia’s interior are giga-tonnes of rotting prehistoric vegetation. If the ground temperature reaches zero then there could be a one-off massive release of CO2 into the atmosphere as gas trapped in the permafrost is released with unpredictable consequences. A process that was thought to take three decades looks like it is going to reach a climax much sooner than expected.
Going to be a long hot summer
Temperatures across the Arctic region are now 20-24 degrees higher than is normal. Temperatures in the Arctic Circle village of Nizhnaya Pesha hit 30 degrees Celsius (86.5
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