We're Doomed!
Posted on 03/04/2005 6:26:42 PM PST by blam
Siberians fear minus 30 is too warm for comfort
By Julius Strauss in Yuchyugay
(Filed: 05/03/2005)
The afternoon high is a little below minus 30 degrees Celsius an hour outside the small Siberian settlement of Yuchyugay, even in the pale winter sun.
But at this time of the year, locals say with a frown, it should be a steady minus 50.
As cars roll across the wide, frozen rivers, traces of running water show where the current runs so fast that the ice melts, a phenomenon, the locals insist, that should only occur much later in the season.
Environmental research already points to rapid climate change in the Arctic and sub-Arctic in years to come, endangering many animals native to the taiga. If some forecasts are to be believed, the polar bear could be extinct by the end of the century.
But in the remotest parts of Siberia the changes have been under way for more than a decade and are even now disrupting the lives of the nomadic herders, hunters and trappers.
According to the locals, the problem is less a rise in temperature than the fact that the weather now varies dramatically from one day to the next, with temperatures sometimes rising or falling up to 30 degrees in the space of a few days.
The Yakuts who live here, an Asiatic people who made their way north centuries before the first Russians arrived, are alarmed.
Valentin Adlasov, the local mayor, said: "The average temperature here in winter used to be minus 53 to 55 degrees and would last for two or three months continuously. Now temperatures vary from week to week. One week its warm, say minus 30, then the temperature falls suddenly to minus 55." Now that the ground no longer freezes properly in winter, in summer the roads and bridges built on the permafrost subside, making transport difficult.
There is also frequent and widespread flooding in summer. "We have unfamiliar birds that come here now and insects that we have never seen before," the mayor said.
"For the old, the changes are dangerous. The huge variations in pressure mean that people have become susceptible to strokes. Others have headaches."
There is also concern that the change in climate will ruin the Yakuts' efforts to pull themselves out of the post-Communist economic mire following the cut in central funding.
Sergei Popov, an ethnic Yakut and a tourist guide, said: "There is no longer proper freezing in the winter and because of that the rivers flood in the summer. They carry away bridges, houses, sometimes whole villages.
"The flooding also strands animals and disrupts their migratory patterns. For the reindeer herders it has made life much more difficult."
The problem is not confined to Yuchyugay. Locals say communities all over Yakutia, a Russian republic larger than Europe, are also aghast.
In Chukotka, the region to the east of Yakutia and hard up against the Bering Strait, the Chukchis say that, as the ice thins, the walrus, a mainstay of their diet, is becoming scarce.
For years the Kremlin echoed the view of the Bush administration that the evidence for global warming is insubstantial and may be wrong.
Only last year President Vladimir Putin made light of western ecologists' warnings.
Tatyana Vlassova, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently spent four years working on the Arctic Climate Impact Survey. Her team surveyed 10 areas of northern Russia.
She said: "When I began I was very sceptical. But the evidence the locals put forward is overwhelming. The reindeer pastures are going, the permafrost is thawing, there is flooding and soil erosion. It's having a huge effect on the traditional way people live."
/s
30 below, global warming is heck.
Let's not say that minus 30 is "warm" OK? It's not. It's not even close. It's cold. It's damn cold. It's frickin' damn cold!
R-22 refigerant boils at -40 degrees fahrenheit.
Arizona and Southern California are experiencing Global Wetting.
BTTT!!!!!
Now there is the crux of the problem. Environmentalist will go far and wide to find some evidence, any evidence, to support their forecast, no matter what they are.
Awhile back there was to be a new ice age. Once they saw that didn't fit their agenda the changed to global warming.
Not long ago SS was going to crash without a tax increase. Now it is fine. There are many such examples.
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