The heatwave that scorched eastern Europe in 2010, killing thousands of people and devastating crops, was the worst since records began and led to the warmest summer on the continent for at least 500 years, a new scientific analysis has revealed. Searing temperatures in July and August 2010 across Russia are estimated to have killed [...]
Signal: Russian heat wave of 2010
Egyptian protests fueled by sky-high food prices driven up by climate change
The throngs of protestors in the streets of Cairo this week have a host of grievances. There are the decades of authoritarian rule of course, and the lack of political expression or economic opportunity. But the uprising grew in part out of protests against high food prices. Food price inflation in Egypt was over 20 [...]
WMO: High number of extreme weather events in 2010
The year 2010 ranked as the warmest year on record, together with 2005 and 1998, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Data received by the WMO show no statistically significant difference between global temperatures in 2010, 2005 and 1998. In 2010, global average temperature was 0.53°C (0.95°F) above the 1961-90 mean. This value is 0.01°C [...]
2010 weather more extreme: 21,000 dead
More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined. “It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves,” said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010. [...]
Natural chance of Russian heat wave: 1.5 in 100,000
We have summarized the behavior of a typical summer in Moscow by a normal bell curve with mean and standard deviation derived from the summer temperature anomalies during the period 1970-2000 the typical choice for current climatology. Compared to that distribution, the values experienced this summer are so unexpected as to be beyond three standard [...]
Russian heat wave unprecedented in over a millennium
Russia has recently seen the longest unprecedented heat wave for at least one thousand years, head of Russian Meteorological Center said on Monday. Wildfires continue to rage across much of the central part of European Russia as the country experiences a heat wave, with temperatures of up to and above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees [...]
Cost of Russian heatwave totals $7-15 billion
Officials say it may take months for the government to tally the damage from the disaster that destroyed over a quarter of Russia’s grain harvest, but several economists have put the cost to the economy this year at roughly 7-15 billion dollars. Moscow registered nearly 11,000 deaths due to an unprecedented heatwave this summer, a [...]
Odds of Moscow heat wave “vanishingly small”
Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels? —the answer, Hansen asserted, is clear. “Almost certainly not.” The frequency of extreme weather events increases disproportionately as global temperatures rise. “Were global temperature not increasing, ” he said, “the chance of an extreme heat wave [...]
Moscow heat wave death total: 11,000
The almost unbelievable heat wave that affected western Russia was unprecedented for that region, and also was one of the deadliest heat waves in world history. The heat wave’s death toll in Moscow alone was estimated by a city official to be approximately 11,000 in July and August. Russia’s 2nd largest city, St. Petersburg, reached [...]
2010 summer heat waves across the globe linked to global warming
The global mean temperature has already risen 0.8 degrees C since pre-industrial times, nearly halfway to a 2-degree-C mark, explained climate scientist Jerry Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. As a result, the heat waves in Russia, the northeastern United States and Japan this summer can all be attributed to the [...]
