In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major report on how the Earth's climate is changing. The main conclusion is that the average temperature on the planet is increasing due to human activities. Based on the global warming over the past half century floods, hurricane winds and extreme temperatures are more frequent around the world. "Vazniye Istorii" studied how the temperature was changing at 519 weather stations in Russia over 59 years - from 1960 to 2019 - and depicts what would be the consequences of such warming that the country and the world will face in the near future.
“We had a good meteorological school, but today it doesn't work. All techniques were developed for a different era, for a stable climate. All our knowledge must be forgotten and revised, ” says biologist Sergei Kirpotin, professor at Tomsk State University. A group of scientists, which he leads, is studying how the climate is changing in Siberia and the Arctic.
According to Kirpotin, global warming is primarily indicated not by an increase in temperature, but by a sharp increase in the number of extreme weather and natural phenomena: floods, hurricane winds, droughts, mudflows. But no one keeps a cumulative record of all these phenomena in Russia.
Therefore, there is no publicly available data on the number of extreme weather influenced conditions in Russia. In this study, we used data on monthly average temperatures from 519 meteorological stations in different Russian regions. We took them from the web-site of the All-Russian Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information - World Data Center (VNIIGMI-WDC). And despite the fact that the method of estimating the cases of temperature changes raises questions for some scientists, even in these data one can see a clear pattern: at least in the last 20 years, Russia has been rapidly warming up.
The data have an error, because there are gaps in the dataset - especially in the readings for 2019, but they do not significantly affect the general pattern.
Editors: Alesya Marokhovskaya, Alexandra Zerkaleva