Amid ‘worst heat wave in history’, Siberia reports record-breaking temperatures

Moscow: Siberia, known for its harsh cold climate, has reported record breaking temperatures as the Russian region is currently amidst the “worst heat wave in history”.

On June 3, temperatures reached 37.9 degrees Celsius in Jalturovosk, its hottest day in Siberia’s history, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera told CNN on Thursday.

Several all-time heat records were also broken on Wednesday, including in Baevo, which reached 39.6 degrees and Barnaul, which hit 38.5 degrees.

Some of these stations have between five and seven decades of temperature recordings, Herrera told CNN.

“So we can say it’s really exceptional. It’s the region’s ‘worst heat wave in history’,” he added.

“Records keep falling today (Thursday) with again temperatures around 40 degrees Celsius,” Herrera told CNN.

An intense and prolonged heat wave in 2020, which saw the Arctic Siberian town of Verkhoyansk hit 38 Celsius, would have been “almost impossible” without human-caused climate change, according to an analysis by a team of international scientists.

“Siberia is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet with hot extremes increasing in intensity,” Omar Baddour, chief of climate monitoring and policy services at the World Meteorological Organization, told CNN.

The region “has seen some very intense heat waves”, said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“These heat waves have major implications for people and nature and will continue to happen more frequently unless we rapidly cut emissions of greenhouse gases,” she told CNN.

It is not just Siberia that has seen record heat this week.

On Wednesday, temperatures of more than 45 degrees were recorded in China, 43 degrees in Uzbekistan and 41 degrees in Kazakhstan.
IANS