Russia warming '2.5 times quicker' than global average: ministry

[NickB79]

http://news.yahoo.com/russia-warming-2-5-times-quicker-global-average-112218465.html

Moscow (AFP) - Russia is warming more than twice as fast as the average for the rest of the world, the environment ministry said Friday, sounding an alarm on the rise in floods and wildfires nationwide.

A government report on environmental protection said temperatures in Russia had warmed by 0.42 degrees Celsius per decade since 1976, or 2.5 times quicker than the global warming trend of 0.17 degrees.

"Climate change leads to growth of dangerous meteorological phenomena," the ministry said in a comment to the report published Friday.

There were 569 such phenomena in Russia in 2014, "the most since monitoring began," the ministry said, specifically mentioning last year's ravaging floods and this year's "water deficit" east of Lake Baikal, which led to a "catastrophic rise in fires."

Russia is a hotbed for psuedo-science denier bullshit. Serves them right.

[bvar22]

1. All I know is that our weather is seriously off kilter.

We live in The Woods, and grow a good percentage of our food.
Most plants NEED a Winter to go dormant.
Well, today, I was working in our Veggie garden ....and it was 82 degrees F.
The erratic weather last year ruined our growing season, and everybody else's around here.
IF the monsoon rains of the Spring did not wash out the seedlings, the extreme heat wave and drought immediately afterward did the rest of the damage.

[LiberalArkie]

2. It has killed off all of my fruit trees. We get the cold weather for them to go dormant.

but then we have a fake spring with warm weather. They produce the leaves and then WAM, 20 or 30 degrees for a week or more. Out of 10 fruit trees I have 1 left.

[bvar22]

6. We're having the same problem.

We're down to two Peach Trees.
Hopefully the grapes will come back, but we're not sure yet.
Last Growing Season just plain sucked.
If THIS is the New Normal, we are all fucked.

WE had a well developed Planting Calendar that worked for a number of years,
but we can't trust it anymore.

[LiberalArkie]

7. This year we are almost at double the rainfall from last year. So all my summer vegetables rotted on

the vine. I did not have to use the drip system at all. My plum tree greened up, but no plums at all. I have 6 blue berry bushes and 3 have died this year (from who knows what). I think I am going to give up on it for a while.

[Efilroft Sul]

14. Here in Pittsburgh, we got 2.5-months' worth of rain in about 10 days in mid June.

My basil looked beautiful when the first day of summer rolled around. By July 4, it was yellowing and thinning like it does in late September. We harvested next to nothing. It was as if the plants were tricked into thinking autumn was on its way. As a result, I was unable to make pesto and clog up my freezer with it for the first time since I started urban gardening nine years ago.

This weather change is not good.

[pscot]

13. If this is now normal

what will 'extreme' look like?

[Dustlawyer]

3. Tomorrow's high is 78 degrees! Should be in low-mid 60's.

[zeemike]

4. What do you mean it serves them right?

A warming planet would not be a bad thing for them...,most of their land is above the arctic circle and they don't have a lot of big cities on the coast. In fact it would open up vast arias for them.

[Cassiopeia]

5. Actually it serves all of us right.

What effects Russia effects us.

Additionally, there are vast methane deposits in the tundras of Russia. We do not want that to be released.

One day we'll realize that when it comes to climate we're all on the same rock and effected regardless of our location on it.

[zeemike]

8. Completely true.

And we are more responsible that Russia and have been the obstacle in many cases to solving it.

[GliderGuider]

9. It's not the warming per se that's the problem

The problem is the destabilization of the weather patterns, and the increase in extreme weather events.

Think of someone dropping you onto a tank of ice water, then hauling you out and dumping you into a tank of boiling water. On average, the temperature of the two tanks was just a nice warm 50C, but you're dead from the shock.

[zeemike]

10. Yes of course it is the destabilization.

But that will hit hardest on the coast. And Russia has little of it.
And the coast they do have will be open water so it will help them. And in fact are already establishing arctic bases.

It is the western world that has the most to lose.

[NickB79]

11. Those vast areas are largely taiga and permafrost

So "opening them up" means thawing the permafrost into fetid swamps and drying out the coniferous forests to the point they go up in massive forest fires, as they just saw in the past couple of years. The soils north of the Arctic are piss-poor for most farming, so all that would remain in those areas to support the economy to them would be mining.

Cities on the coast would rely on shipping and fishing for survival, but if we can't get our warming under control that shipping and fishing goes away as fish stocks are wiped out by a warmer, acidic ocean and other nation's economies collapse under the weight of climate-change-induced depressions.

That's the beauty of living in a globally spanning civilization. Even if warming is beneficial in the short term for a region, it is inevitably harmful in the long term as the damage caused to other parts of the planet pulls that region down with the rest.

[zeemike]

12. Don't get me wrong it won't be good for anyone.

But the point I was making is that it will be worse for us and the western nations.
The land they have is not in production and most of ours is. And where their problem is melting permafrost ours will be desertification.