Abnormal heat in Siberia would be practically impossible without the impact of human activity on the state of the Earth's climate. This conclusion was reached by a group of scientists from Russia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Switzerland, whose research results were posted on Wednesday on the website of a scientific association called World Weather Attribution.
Scientists including Olga Zolina from the P. P. Shirshov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, analyzed the fluctuations in the average temperature in Siberia from January to June 2020, as well as the record in Verkhoyansk, where on June 20 the air temperature reached the highest in the history of systematic observations of weather and climate in the Arctic region. “In both cases, we found that such events would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change,” the report says.
As scientists calculated "with a high degree of probability", climate change has increased the likelihood of a prolonged warm period in the first half of 2020 "at least 600 times." Such prolonged periods of heat in normal circumstances occur extremely rarely - once every 130 years. The use of various forecasting models and the results of previous observations showed that the average temperature in the above-mentioned region should have been two degrees lower if the heatwave had come in 1900. In Siberia, in 2050, the average temperature will be 2.5 degrees higher than in 1900, but it may turn out to be seven degrees higher.
As the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) informed in June, last May was the warmest in the history of weather and climate observations, and the period from January to May took the second line in the list of the warmest, losing only to the first five months of 2016. WMO backed up its bulletin with data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the EU Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Record rates were recorded on June 20 in Verkhoyansk, when the air temperature was plus 38 degrees, which is the absolute observed maximum. Later, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that it would consider registering the unusually high temperature recorded in Verkhoyansk in northern Yakutia as a record for territories north of the Arctic Circle.
In early July, Yakut forecasters recorded a cold snap in the Arctic regions of Yakutia, where anomalous heat was previously observed.