Heat wave in Siberia: climate change reaches a dangerous threshold

It is still being reviewed. The world meteorology authority wants to be sure whether the message is true, on the Saturday, the 20. June, at half past eleven o'clock the public was: In the North of Siberia were measured at 9 am that Morning 38.0 degrees Celsius – in Verkhoyansk, which is actually one of the coldest inhabited place in the world. This time, the little more than thousand inhabitants have not always a lot of light, the sun also rises at night, but this year you have thirty degrees more than usual. In the Yukon, in Alaska, a hundred kilometers to the South, but still North of the Arctic circle, was measured in 1915, once similarly high temperatures. At that time such weather conditions were still extreme vagaries of nature.

Joachim Müller-Jung

editor in the features section, responsible for the area of "nature and science".

But what has been happening for a few weeks in a large area of Eastern Siberia, is quite obviously a part of the new normal. The accelerated climate change, triggered by decades of unchecked accumulation of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and in particular carbon dioxide, is destabilizing the earth's atmosphere now is scary fast. The polar vortex, with its massive air currents in the upper atmosphere that kept the Arctic is reliable in the cold air influence from the North, as long as people can think, comes under the converging temperature differences between the North and the South more and more often to Stumble.

warm air and a week-long advance of areas of high pressure to the North. There, the soil and air heat up all the more, the more ice is lost, and thus solar energy is absorbed on a dark background. Because the sun is not day and night, there is no discharge. In the Arctic, it is said, for years, climate change is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the hemisphere. In many regions, is an understatement. In Ust-Olenek, which is located significantly to the North as Verkhoyansk directly to the Laptev sea, the "ice house" in Siberia, were still at 30. June South seas temperatures of 34 degrees measured.