news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599200808100
A tree trunk burning amid smoldering remnants of a forest outside the village of Kadanok, 90 miles (150 kilometers) southeast of Moscow, seen Tuesday, AP - A tree trunk burning amid smoldering remnants of a forest outside the village of Kadanok, 90 miles (150 ...
CBS 2 / KCAL 9 Los Angeles By SIMON SHUSTER / MOSCOW Simon Shuster / Moscow - Tue Aug 3, 1:40 am ET Russians are not used to heat waves. When the high temperatures that have overwhelmed Russia over the past six weeks first arrived in June, some 1,200 Russians drowned at the country's beaches. "The majority of those who drowned were drunk," the Emergencies Ministry concluded in mid-July, citing the Russian habit of taking vodka to cool off by the sea. But while overconsumption of vodka is a familiar scourge in Russia, extreme heat is not, and as the worst heat wave on record spawns wildfires that are destroying entire villages, Russian officials have made what for them is a startling admission: global warming is very real. At a meeting of international sporting officials in Moscow on July 30, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that in 14 regions of the country, "practically everything is burning. Then, as TV cameras zoomed in on the perspiration shining on his forehead, Medvedev announced, "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."
Only last year, he announced that Russia, the world's third largest polluter after China and the US, would be spewing 30% more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere by 2020. "We will not cut our development potential," he said during the summer of 2009 (an unusually mild one), just a few months before attending the Copenhagen climate summit, which in December failed to reach a substantial agreement on how to limit carbon emissions. But even that pronouncement, grim as it seemed to the organizers of the Copenhagen talks, was mild compared with the broader Russian campaign against the idea that global warming is taking place. Two months before Copenhagen, state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia's involvement in the leak.
Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter, he called the global-warming debate "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects." But Medvedev's climate-sensitive comments on Friday, Chuprov says, could finally mark the start of a policy shift. "You don't just throw comments like that around when you are the leader of the nation, and if you look at what is happening with this heat wave, it's horrible. It's clearly enough to shake people out of their delusions about global warming." The heat wave first started alarming authorities in June, when local officials recorded abnormally high fatalities on Russia's beaches. At the same time, a devastating drought was withering Russia's crops. As of July 30, some 25 million acres (about 10 million hectares) of grain had been lost, an area roughly the size of Kentucky - and growing. Then last week, fires that had been ignored for days by local officials began spreading out of control. Scores of people have been killed in the fires, and in the outskirts of Moscow, burning fields of peat, a kind of fuel made of decayed vegetation, periodically covered the city in a cloud of noxious smoke, making it painful to breathe in parts of the Russian capital. Medvedev has not been the only person in Russia to link the ongoing heat wave to climate change. Alexei Lyakhov, head of Moscow's meteorological center, tells TIME it is "clearly part of a global phenomenon" that is hitting Russia. "We have to start taking systemic measures of adaptation. Just like human beings at one point took steps to adapt to the Ice Age, we now have to adapt to this," he says, citing cuts to carbon emissions as one of the necessary adaptations. Now that Medvedev is also acknowledging the effects of climate change, Russia's official line on the subject could start to change, Chuprov says. But he warns that convincing the public of the threat from global warming may be difficult. "The status quo can change quickly in the minds of bureaucrats if the leadership gives the signal. But in the minds of the people, myths are much more difficult to uproot," he says. As if to prove the point, Russia's largest circulation newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran a headline on July 31 that asked, "Is the Russian heat wave the result of the USA testing its climate weapon?"
Report Abuse Has South America's Cold Wave Changed Stance on Climate Change? as well as the declaration of local weather events now being proof of global warming.
Report Abuse Denying global warming is like a man who is asked if he is in a forest saying "I can't tell if I am in a forest because all of these trees are in the way of my view so how can I say for sure I am in a forest". Accepting a fact without letting politics cloud your opinion is a sign of intelligence.
Once enough Greenland Ice melts into the Atlantic Ocean, the thermal cline will shut down and it will be the beginning of the next ice age - an even scarier though than Global Warming... At least coming ice age will wipe out the national debt... Will the next in line to become the Earths "most dominant species" please get in line to evolve...
Report Abuse Here's an amusing exercise for right wing global warming deniers. The Pentagon study said that we might run into tipping points where human activity would suddenly create really dangerous changes. It suggested that climate change could destabilize many countries involving us in many new wars and relief missions. I will leave it to those whose minds have been expanded by right wing radio and abuse of prescription pain killers to explain how Al Gore and those pesky liberals are behind it all.
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