Does Anyone Still Question Climate Change: Wildfires in Russia (472 hits)
Tourists with face masks walk along Red Square in a thick blanket of smog.
There's a moment of peace for me here right at the Domodedovo Airport in Moscow, as the hypnotic hum of the air conditioner and blanket of the sound sealed windows briefly block the chaos outside. The movie I've come to work on, an alien apocalyptic thriller called The Darkest Hour, decided no more than forty]eight hours ago to halt production for a minimum of two weeks.
The reason for this is a common clause in the world of contracts: force majeure, an "act of God" that is unforeseeable and out of the control of the parties involved. A hurricane, a tornado, flooding -- or in this case, devastating fires that have wreaked havoc across Mother Russia.
Everyone is talking about climate change now... Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.
And not just the way they work, but also the way they try to cool off from the heat wave itself; the number of drownings -- mainly in unguarded areas of the Moscow River, and many under the influence of alcohol -- has passed 2,000. As of now, the average mortality rate in Moscow has doubled from its average to 700 per day. As if the sweltering, oppressive roast of the heat wasn't enough, enter the fires.
All across Russia fires have been ignited in peat bogs, or underground marshes, many of which have dried up in the past decades, making them extremely susceptible to combustion. With hundreds springing up per day across Russia -- some of them even as close as forty kilometers outside Moscow --the country is under the merciless siege of a natural disaster.
The fires right now in Russia cover over 420,100 acres, and as of this writing over 500 individual fires are still burning.
