New Year’s Eve is an important family holiday in Russia, with people from all over the country taking the week off to celebrate. Residents in Moscow could have expected to sound in 2021 amid cold temperatures, as is often the case in the Russian capital. But this year, Moscow has experienced a warm, messy climate, and it is clear that it has no snow.
To combat this conundrum and strengthen the festive mood, officials have been engaged in transporting artificial snow to parts of the city center, according to Ivan Nechepurenko of the New York News. The “snow” originated from the ice cut on the skating rinks and most of it melted shortly after it was deposited between Moscow’s Christmas trees and light decorations.
Officials said the snow was used to build a hill for snowboarders, and that some of the fluffy stuff was also being sent to the city’s festive displays. Social media users happily captured photos of a sad, melted snow pile that appeared to be guarded by fences in Red Square. Some, according to the GuardianAndrew Roth, noted the irony of transporting snow to a city that spends millions of dollars each year removing it. And on Monday night, a snowstorm seemed to make artificial snowfall unnecessary by bringing a gust of gusts to the city streets, although forecasts suggest that this snow will melt before the new year.
While some have scoffed at the effort, Moscow’s plan to counter its lack of snow points to the serious effects of climate change in Russia. This year, the country experienced its warmest climate on record. On December 18, temperatures in the capital rose to about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, surpassing the record for the month set in 1886.
“It’s not at all normal,” an Alexander Stanko told Roth as he watched the holiday decor near the Kremlin. “Winters used to be much harsher.”
This winter has been so warm that brown bears at the Bolsherechensky Zoo in the Omsk region came out of hibernation and flowers began to bloom prematurely in the apothecary garden of Moscow State University, according to Isabelle Khurshudyan, of the Washington Post. Earlier this month, dozens of polar bears descended on a village in the remote Chukotka region of Russia; the melting of the ice had altered the hunting patterns of the animals, CNNRadina Gigova reported at the time and hungry bones were looking for food.
Through the northern Siberian landscape, the rapidly thawing permafrost causes people to leave their homes; entire neighborhoods fall into rising rivers, arable land dwindles and livestock and reindeer farming becomes more difficult due to the destruction of pastures, according to Anton Troianovski and Chris Mooney of Independent. In addition, melting permafrost in the Arctic releases methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will accelerate global warming, scientists say.
Experts agree that these climate consequences are largely caused by human activities, particularly those that cause the emission of greenhouse gases. Russia, one of the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, recently adopted the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. But under pressure from companies, the country’s legislation on climate change was “diluted” to exclude carbon emissions quotas and a national carbon trading system, Khurshudyan’s Publication reports.
At his year-end press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that the country is warming 2.5 times faster than the global average.
“As you know, Russia is a northern country and 70 percent of our territory is in the northern latitudes,” he said. “Some of our cities were built north of the Arctic Circle, on the permafrost. If it starts to thaw, you can imagine what the consequences would be. It’s very serious. “
But Putin has stopped attributing climate change to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions, saying “no one really knows” the cause of global climate change, a prospect not limited to the president. of the nation.
“The Russians believe in it [global warming]”They see climate change. But they, like Putin, don’t know why it’s happening,” said Vasily Yablokov, project coordinator at Greenpeace in Khurshudyan.
“Not everyone connects it,” Yablokov points out, “but a lot of people relate it to the cause of human beings.”