Climate Articles
Stanford poll: The vast majority of Americans know global warming is real
Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents agree: Global warming is here and we're causing it.
Large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that global warming is real-and that humans are causing it.
So says the latest poll from Jon Krosnick, senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Krosnick found that large majorities of Florida, Maine, and Massachusetts residents believe that:
* The Earth has been getting warming gradually over the last 100 years (81 percent, 78 percent, and 84 percent, respectively).
* This warming is mostly or partly due to human activity (72 percent, 76 percent, and 80 percent).
* The U.S. government should take action to limit the greenhouse gas emissions of businesses (74 percent, 77 percent, and 77 percent), with at least 74 percent of all such respondents agreeing that the government should move to limit emissions right away.
* A cap-and-trade permit trading system should be implemented to reduce businesses' greenhouse gas emissions (68 percent, 72 percent, and 77 percent).
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Masters: "2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records-fifteen"
As nation, Russia, and world swelter under record heat, NY Times' Tom Zeller publishes dreadful he-said/she-said, quote-mining piece
We now know that "After the hottest decade on record, it's the hottest year on record, seemingly the hottest week of all time in satellite record and we may be at record low Arctic sea ice volume." In this country, we saw new daily high temperature records beat new cold records by nearly 5 to 1 in June.
Uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters reports today:
The year 2010 is now tied with 2007 as the year with the most national extreme heat records-fifteen.
So, naturally, the NY Times is out with what would, for any other paper, be one of its worst climate stories ever, but which is just run-of-the-mill dreadful for the former paper of record (see here)?
The Tom Zeller's piece, "Is It Hot in Here? Must Be Global Warming," buries the one crucial scientific fact that eviscerates its entire narrative:
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Washington Post on "The truth about global warming"
Does this mean they'll stop printing the lies about global warming?
IN A DEPRESSING case of irony by juxtaposition, the death of climate change legislation in the Senate has been followed by the appearance of two government reports in the past week that underscore the overwhelming scientific case for global warming - and go out of the way to repudiate skeptics.
So opens "The truth about global warming," an editorial in today's Washington Post. Apparently lost on the editors is the other equally depressing case of irony by juxtaposition:
* WashPost goes tabloid, publishes second falsehood-filled op-ed by Sarah Palin in five months - on climate science and the hacked emails!
* WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ.
* The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages
And that is but the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg, which is which why the Post won the 2009 "Citizen Kane" award for non-excellence in climate journalism.
Does this editorial now mean the Post will repudiate skeptics like Palin and Will - or, rather, refudiate them?
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WattsUpWithThat hypes itself with most discredited web metric (hits!) and keeps smearing scientists while demanding others "dial back the rhetoric"
The NYT's Virginia Heffernan now "regrets" being duped by Watts
As long as Anthony Watts keeps a website "hits" counter on his sidebar and keeps bragging that his hits are evidence of his blog's popularity, that will provide the most irrefutable evidence of his innumeracy and his willful statistical deception.
One thing is very safe to say about any quantitative analysis you see from Anthony Watts: It is, with high-probability, pure BS. See, for instance, Wattergate: Tamino debunks "just plain wrong" Anthony Watts.
Worse, Watts has, perhaps more than any other leading anti-science blogger, viciously smeared climate scientists and others. Yet in a post touting the most meaningless statistic on the web - his 50 millionth hit - he has the nerve to write, "I'm really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It's palpable." What's palpable is his hypocrisy.
On Memorial Day, for instance, Watts directly questioned the patriotism of both Tamino and Rabett (see "Peak readership for anti-science blogs?") leading Tamino to write, "This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog."
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Climate Denial Crock of the Week: Heatwave Edition
Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has two - count 'em! - new videos for this endless summer, taking on Inhofe, Christy, and the global cooling myth:
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Lewis Pugh's mind-shifting Everest swim
After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori, a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest -- and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change.
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State of the Climate: Hottest Decade on Record
The past decade was the hottest recorded, part of an unequivocal pattern of warming dating back 50 years, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report declared on Wednesday.
The annual "State of the Climate" report drew on the findings more than 300 climate scientists in 48 countries who measured 10 separate planetwide features, including air and sea temperatures, humidity, Arctic sea ice, glaciers, and spring snow cover in the Northern hemisphere.
"The records come from many institutions worldwide," Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the agency's administrator, said in a statement. "They use data collected from diverse sources, including satellites, weather balloons, weather stations, ships, buoys and field surveys. These independently produced lines of evidence all point to the same conclusion: our planet is warming."
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NASA Satellite Improves Pollution Monitoring
MADISON, WI - NASA scientists improved watershed pollution monitoring models by incorporating satellite and ground-based observations of precipitation. The NASA data replaces weather station observations, and will allow states to monitor non-point pollution and improve water quality.
The research team, led by Joseph Nigro of Science Systems and Applications, Inc., incorporated two NASA products into a computer program in BASINS (Better Assessment Science Integrating Nonpoint Sources) that calculates streamflow rates and pollution concentrations.
The current model uses meteorological data from weather stations, which can miss precipitation events and cause errors in modeling water quality. With better precipitation data, scientists will be able to obtain better estimates of the amount of pollution a body of water can carry before it is determined to be "polluted."
The study revealed that both NASA products dramatically improved water quality model performance over the default weather stations. Both systems improved model performance but neither one was consistently better than the other. The NASA data systems were better able to capture the effects of water flow during storm periods that occur frequently in the summer months. This is due to the seamless coverage of the datasets as opposed to a single weather station that cannot represent all precipitation events in a given watershed.
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Key Compound of Ozone Destruction Detected
BADEN, GERMANY -- For the first time, KIT scientists have successfully measured in the ozone layer the chlorine compound ClOOCl which plays an important role in stratospheric ozone depletion. The doubts in the established models of polar ozone chemistry expressed by American researchers based on laboratory measurements are disproved by these new atmospheric observations. The established role played by chlorine compounds in atmospheric ozone chemistry is in fact confirmed by KIT's atmospheric measurements.
The ozone hole above the Antarctic and the destructive role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) and their decomposition products have become a synonym of both global environmental problems and their solution by concerted agreements worldwide. Scientific fundamental research into ozone chemistry of the atmosphere was the basis of international agreements, such as the Montreal Protocol of 1987, which has put limits on CFC production. The success of the political implementation of these scientific findings is reflected by the fact that the chlorine content of the atmosphere and, hence, the ozone destruction potential recently started to decrease slowly.
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Warmer Climate Entails Increased Release of Carbon Dioxide by Inland Lakes
UPPSALA, SWEDEN -- Much organically bound carbon is deposited on inland lake bottoms. A portion remains in the sediment, sometimes for thousands of years, while the rest is largely broken down to carbon dioxide and methane, which are released into the atmosphere. Swedish researchers have shown that carbon retention by sediment is highly temperature-sensitive and that a warmer climate would result in increased carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. The study is published in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Particles of different kinds - including microscopic algae, other plankton and humus from surrounding land areas - are continuously deposited on lake bottoms. The breakdown of a portion of this matter by bacteria in the sediment contributes significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Lake sediment nevertheless constitutes an important "carbon sink," serving to store - sometimes for a very long time - a significant portion of the carbon-containing material that does not decompose.
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Aurora Alert: The Sun Is Waking Up
ScienceDaily (Aug. 3, 2010) - Sky viewers might get to enjoy some spectacular Northern Lights, or aurorae. After a long slumber, the Sun is waking up. Early Sunday morning, the Sun's surface erupted and blasted tons of plasma (ionized atoms) into interplanetary space. That plasma is headed our way, and when it arrives, it could create a spectacular light show.
"This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th," said astronomer Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "It's the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time."
The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, was caught on camera by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) -- a spacecraft that launched in February. SDO provides better-than-HD quality views of the Sun at a variety of wavelengths.
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New Carbon Dioxide Emissions Model
ScienceDaily (Aug. 3, 2010) - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated projected temperature changes for various scenarios in 2007 and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg have now gone one step further: they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the critical threshold for climate warming of two degrees Celsius. To do this, the scientists incorporated into their calculations data relating to the carbon cycle, namely the volume of carbon dioxide absorbed and released by the oceans and forests.
The aim of the international ENSEMBLES project is to simulate future changes in the global climate and carbon dioxide emissions and thereby to obtain more reliable threshold values on this basis.
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Will Russia's Heat Wave End Its Global-Warming Doubts?
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. The weather is anomalously hot." 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."
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Frozen CO2, methane a time bomb: experts
Massive volumes of carbon dioxide and methane frozen in the earth's soils are a "time-bomb ticking under our feet", soil scientists say.
The thawing of vast areas of frozen soils and the decay of peatlands under higher global temperatures could release massive volumes of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere - potentially doubling the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
The World Congress of Soil Scientists in Brisbane has been told that frozen soils and peatlands in the northern hemisphere are estimated to store up to 50 per cent of the world's organic soil carbon.
University of Wisconsin-Madison soil scientist Dr James Bockheim said global warming threatens to thaw these soils, some of which have been frozen for thousands of years.
"Atmospheric temperatures have increased by 3 (degrees) C over the past decades in the Arctic and Antarctic regions and this continued warming may cause carbon stored in the surface permafrost to be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide," he said.
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Researchers Drill Through Mile and a Half of Greenland Ice Sheet in Search of Climate Change Insights
ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2010) - After years of concentrated effort, scientists from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project hit bedrock more than 8,300 feet below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet last week. The project has yielded ice core samples that may offer valuable insights into how the world can change during periods of abrupt warming.
Led by Denmark and the United States, and comprised of scientists from 14 countries, the NEEM team has been working to get at the ice near bedrock level because that ice dates back to the Eemian interglacial period, about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when temperatures on Earth were warmer by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit than they are today. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate scientists valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes.
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A Looming Oxygen Crisis and Its Impact on World's Oceans
As warming intensifies, scientists warn, the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more diminished, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life.
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is overshadowing another catastrophe that's also unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico this summer: The oxygen dissolved in the Gulf waters is disappearing. In some places, the oxygen is getting so scarce that fish and other animals cannot survive. They can either leave the oxygen-free waters or die. The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium reported this week that this year's so-called "dead zone" covers 7,722 square miles.
Unlike the Deepwater Horizon disaster, this summer's dead zone is not a new phenomenon in the Gulf. It first appeared in the 1970s, and each summer it has returned, growing bigger as the years have passed. Its expansion reflects the rising level of fertilizers that farmers in the U.S. Midwest have spread across their fields. Rain carries much of that fertilizer into the Mississippi River, which then delivers it to the sea. Once the fertilizer reaches the Gulf, it spurs algae to grow, providing a feast for bacteria, which grow so fast they use up all the oxygen in their neighborhood. The same phenomenon is repeating itself along many coastlines around the world. This summer, a 377,000-square-kilometer (145,000-square-mile) dead zone appeared in the Baltic Sea. In 2008, scientists reported that new dead zones have been popping up at an alarming rate for the past 50 years. There are now more than 400 coastal dead zones around the world.
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Climate change could destroy 80 per cent of rainforest by next century
Fewer than one in five of the plants and animals which currently live in the world's rainforests will still be here in 90 years time, a study predicts.
Rainforests currently hold more than half of all the plant and animal species on Earth.
However, scientists say the combined effects of climate change and deforestation may force them to adapt, move, or die.
By 2100, this could have altered two-thirds of the rainforests in Central and South America, about 70 per cent in Africa.
The Amazon Basin alone could see changes in biodiversity for 80 per cent of the region.
Greg Asner, of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in California, who led the research, said it was the first study yet to show the world's natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes.
He explained: "This is the first global compilation of projected ecosystem impacts for humid tropical forests affected by these combined forces.
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On Our Radar: Russia Warns of Climate Change
During an unparalleled heat wave, President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia steps up his climate warnings. "Everyone is talking about climate change now. Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past," he says. "This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past." [Kremlin]
Russia halts grain exports as drought, heat and fire devastate crops.
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Worst Impact of Climate Change May Be How Humanity Reacts to It
ScienceDaily (Aug. 6, 2010) - The way that humanity reacts to climate change may do more damage to many areas of the planet than climate change itself unless we plan properly, an important new study published in Conservation Letters by Conservation International's Will Turner and a group of other leading scientists has concluded.
The paper Climate change: helping nature survive the human response, looks at efforts to both reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and potential action that could be taken by people to adapt to a changed climate and assesses the potential impact that these could have on global ecosystems.
In particular it notes that one fifth of the world's remaining tropical forests lie within 50km of human populations that could be inundated if sea levels rise by 1m. These forests would make attractive sources of fuel-wood, building materials, food and other key resources and would be likely to attract a population forced to migrate by rising sea levels. About half of all Alliance for Zero Extinction sites -- which contain the last surviving members of certain species -- are also in these zones.
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Biggest ice island for 48 years breaks off Greenland glacier
Scientists say the 100 square mile ice island, 600ft thick, is 'very unusual' and the biggest formation of its kind since 1962
An ice island with an area of 100 square miles has broken off from one of Greenland's two main glaciers in what scientists say is the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.
The huge chunk of ice, which is 600ft thick, broke off the Petermann Glacier, located about 620 miles south of the North Pole, on Thursday.
It is now drifting in a remote area called the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada.
Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware, said satellite images have revealed that the glacier has lost about a quarter of its 43-mile-long floating ice shelf.
The last time such a large ice island formed was in 1962 when the Canadian Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved an island. Smaller pieces of that chunk became lodged between real islands inside the Nares Strait.
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Fires lay ghostly shroud of smoke on Moscow
MOSCOW - A miasma of smoke from wildfires cloaked the sweltering Russian capital on Friday, turning the city's spires into ominous blurs and grounding flights while glum pedestrians trudged the streets with faces hidden by surgical masks and water-soaked bandanas.
The smoke crept into many buildings, hovering about the ceiling in entryways. The State Historical Museum, on Red Square was forced to close because it couldn't stop its smoke detectors from going off.
Airborne pollutants such as carbon monoxide were four times higher than average readings - the worst seen to date in Moscow, city health officials reported. The concentration appeared likely to intensify; the state news agency ITAR-Tass reported smoke was thickening in the city's southeast late Friday.
The fires, which are raging across much of western Russia, come after weeks of extraordinary heat - daily highs of up to 100 (38 C) compared with the summer average of 75 - and practically no rain.
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Has a Warming Russia Outpaced the World?
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.
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The most record-breaking weather since . . .
ANOTHER MONTH has passed, another weather record has been broken. Hot on the heels of Met Éireann's announcement that this June was the warmest in more than 40 years comes news that parts of the country experienced the wettest July in 60 years. It almost seems that every year or month produces a new meteorological record of one kind or another.
A quick check of Irish Times articles backs up this observation. Like 2010, both 2009 and 2008 had Julys that were some of the wettest for years. In 2009, November experienced some of the heaviest rainfall in 500 years. The summer of 2006 was the warmest in 11 years, the summer of 2005 was named the warmest in 10 years . . . The list goes on.
How can so many "records" be produced on such a regular basis, and can these statistics be considered in any way meaningful? One explanation for this continual record-breaking is the relatively limited duration of weather records with which to compare new statistics.
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Greenland Glacier Calves Island Four Times the Size of Manhattan
ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2010) - A University of Delaware researcher reports that an "ice island" four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.
"In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland," said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Muenchow's research in Nares Strait, between Greenland and Canada, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.
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Delaware weather: Going to extremes
No matter the season, records fall -- but experts aren't certain why
Record snowfalls in February. Record heat in July.
In 2010, Delaware shoveled and sweated through the most drastic winter and summer seasons that it's seen in years.
And though some believe this year's extremes are rare, experts say severe fluctuations in weather -- and the impact they have on the environment -- are becoming more common.
In the 1950s, there were less than 50 climate-related natural disasters, according to the World Meteorological Organization. That number climbed to between 350 and 400 in 2000, it said.
As those numbers grow, so does the cost of dealing with them.
In Delaware alone, federal disaster spending since the March Storm of 1962 -- the first of Delaware's 13 declared federal disasters -- topped $76 million -- for everything from help covering expenses for snow removal this past winter to flood responses in Seaford in 2006. The whopper storm for Delaware was a nor'easter in 1962. When the cost is adjusted to 2009, it comes in at more than $22 million in federal assistance.
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Would Simply Slowing Down Our Travel & Shipping Help Kick Our Oil Habit?
Having assessed the overall picture of how our patterns of global shipping and global aviation use tons of fuel, leave a high environmental footprint, and how technological changes can help but perhaps not fully solve the problem, let's move on to how we can change ourselves and our habits. Remember, we want to keep as much of the benefits of global trade and travel as we can, while absolutely minimizing the environment cost. So, would simply slowing down the speed, literally and figuratively, with which we move goods and ourselves about the planet be a viable solution?
Greater Regionalization Could Reduce Fuel Usage
When it comes to goods, we're already moving pretty slowly. Container ships move more goods with less human-effort per unit shipped and with much more regular schedules than did ships prior to containerization and during the age of sail, but in terms of sailing speed alone, we're not moving things about markedly faster than we used to.
Aside from reductions in fuel usage aboard ship due to technological advances, one way to reduce the impact of shipping--in fact it's a facet of slowing down, broadly conceived--would be to reduce the volume of goods traded globally.
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NASA Instrument Tracks Pollution from Russian Fires
ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2010) - Drought and the worst heat wave Russia has seen in 130 years have sparked a devastating outbreak of wildfires across the nation this summer, primarily in the country's western and central regions.
According to wire service reports and Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry, as of Aug. 6, 2010, some 558 fires were burning. The fires have killed at least 52 people, destroyed some 2,000 homes and charred more than 1,796 square kilometers (693 square miles). Russia's capital city of Moscow is currently blanketed in a thick smog, which has curtailed activities and disrupted air traffic. According to the Associated Press, levels of carbon monoxide pollution in Moscow are at an all-time high, four times higher than normal.
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft is tracking the concentration and transport of carbon monoxide from the Russian fires. The figures presented here show the abundance of carbon monoxide present in the atmosphere at an altitude of 5.5 kilometers (18,000 feet). AIRS is sensitive to carbon monoxide in the mid-troposphere at heights between 2 and 10 kilometers (1.2 and 6.2 miles), with a peak sensitivity at an altitude of approximately 5 kilometers (3.1 miles). This region of Earth's atmosphere is also conducive to the long-range transport of the pollution that is lofted to this altitude.
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Rebutting climate science disinformer talking points in a single line
Progressives should know the most commonly used arguments by the disinformers and doubters - and how to answer them. You should know as much of the science behind those rebuttals as possible, and a great place to start is SkepticalScience.com.
BUT most of the time your best response is to give the pithiest response possible, and then refer people to a specific website that has a more detailed scientific explanation with links to the original science. That's because usually those you are talking to are rarely in a position to adjudicate scientific arguments. Indeed, they would probably tune out. Also, unless you know the science cold, you are as likely as not to make a misstatement.
Physicist John Cook has done us a great service by posting good one-line responses, which I repost with links below. For instance, if somebody raises the standard talking point that the climate has changed before, you can say, "Climate reacts to whatever forces it to change at the time, which now is dominated by humans." That it is actually quite similar to my standard response, "The climate changes when it is forced to change, and now humans are forcing it to change far more rapidly than in the past" (see "Humans boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks" and "Yes, the atmospheric CO2 fraction has risen at a dangerously fast rate in the past 160 years, reaching levels not seen in millions of years"). Working in the "now is dominated by humans" part is a good idea.
Cook explains the origin of these one-liners in his post, "Rebutting skeptic arguments in a single line" (and posted those answers alongside previous paragraph-long answers here).
Ideas for improvement are very welcome. I'll repeat his caveat:
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Moscow deaths double in Russia's 'worst ever' heat
MOSCOW - The daily mortality rate in Moscow has doubled and morgues are overflowing amid an acrid smog caused by the worst heatwave in Russia's thousand-year history, officials said Monday.
The smog from the peat and forest fires burning in the countryside around 100 kilometres outside the city has choked Moscow for days, seeping into apartments, offices and even the metro, and causing thousands to flee.
"In usual times 360-380 people are dying each day. Now it is around 700," the head of Moscow's health department, Andrei Seltsovsky, said in televised remarks, acknowledging that city morgues were filled almost to capacity.
Emergency services meanwhile reported about 557 wildfires were burning over 174,000 hectares (430,000 acres) in central Russia and the Moscow region, with flames also raging close to a nuclear reprocessing site in the Urals.
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Officials point to Russian drought and Asian deluge as consistent with climate change
Government officials are pointing to the drought and wildfires in Russia, and the floods across Central and East Asia as consistent with climate change predictions. While climatologists say that a single weather event cannot be linked directly to a warming planet, patterns of worsening storms, severer droughts, and disasters brought on by extreme weather are expected as the planet warms.
Russia burning
In Russia, likely thousands of people have died from heat-related illnesses and 20 percent of the nation's grain harvest has been lost due to a prolonged drought, record-breaking high temperatures, and hundreds of peatland and forest fires, which have blanketed Moscow in a toxic fog. This summer Moscow has broken 100 degrees Fahrenheit a number of times, while the previous record was 99 degrees Fahrenheit.
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