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Early and Severe Wildfire Situation Develops in Alaska as Fuel Conditions Reach "Historical Maximum Levels" in Some Areas

High temperature records are tumbling, wildfires are multiplying and firefighting resources are stretched as Alaskan fire season kicks into high gear earlier than usual.  The conditions are part of an emerging trend: wildfires are serving as agents of change over Alaska's landscape as the state's climate rapidly changes.

surface temperatures also are rising over land.  Among the consequences are earlier and more severe wildfire seasons, especially when warmer temperatures are accompanied by lower precipitation levels. The current fire situation in Alaska provides a sobering example of how such changes are stoking wildfires in northern latitudes. 

undra fire burned 1,000 square miles of an area near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, three years ago that showed no prior evidence of burning going back thousands of years. Inuits, indigenous people of the Arctic, "never had a word in their language for thunderstorms," said Bob Corell, of the Arlington, Va.-based Global Environment & Technology Foundation. "And a thunderstorm was most likely to blame for that fire."

In 1970-2008, disasters caused by climate change (storms, floods, droughts, forest fires, extreme temperatures, and health) cost LAC countries US$81.4 billion a year.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has declared a state of emergency in seven Russian regions because of wildfires fuelled by a heatwave. The death toll from the fires has risen to at least 34. The Russian emergencies ministry said 500 new blazes had been discovered over a 24-hour period, but most had been extinguished. Homes have been burnt in 14 regions of Russia, the worst-hit being Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and Ryazan. The state of emergency was announced in a decree that also restricted public access to the regions affected. Moscow is again shrouded in smoke from peat and forest fires outside the city. The fires, caused by record temperatures and a drought, have affected cereal harvests, driving wheat prices up.

Russians are bracing themselves for another week of high temperatures, with forecasts of up to 40C (104F) for central and southern regions. Officials also expect stronger winds in some regions, which will fan the flames. By Sunday night, wildfires were still raging across some 128,000 ha (316,000 acres).

Thousands of people have lost their homes and nearly a quarter of a million emergency workers have been deployed to fight the flames. President Medvedev described the situation on Saturday as a "natural disaster of the kind that probably only happens every 30 or 40 years". Moscow doctors say the elderly and toddlers should wear gauze masks outdoors.

July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Muscovites sweltered as the temperature soared to a record 37.4 degrees Celsius (99.3 Fahrenheit), and the number of Russians who drowned trying to beat the heat reached about 2,000.

Today’s temperature in the capital was the hottest since records began 130 years ago, the Hydrometeorological Monitoring Service said on its website. It surpassed the previous high of 36.8 degrees set in July 1920 during the Civil War. The mercury may rise to 38 degrees on July 29, according to Gidromettsentr, the state weather service. Unusually high temperatures have contributed to record deaths by drowning across Russia, which increased by 688 in the past three weeks, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported on July 23, citing Emergency Situations Ministry data. Most of those who drowned were intoxicated, the government’s newspaper of record said. Another 39 people died yesterday, the ministry said on its website.

The heat wave has also hit Russia’s economy, with drought damage to 10.1 million hectares, or 32 percent of all land under cultivation, Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik said on July 23. The ministry has declared weather-related emergencies in 23 crop-producing regions. Russian food grain prices may double in 2010 from last year because of the drought, the Grain Producers’ Union said in an e- mailed statement today. OAO GAZ, the van and truck maker controlled by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, halted production for two weeks because of the heat. Workers were sent home today on a “corporate vacation” through Aug. 8, spokeswoman Natalya Anisimova said by telephone.

AS anyone who works in a museum knows, art conservators can be slow to embrace change. But for Sarah Staniforth, director of historic properties at the National Trust in Britain, the eye opener came last September, as she contemplated photographs of a torrential downpour that had just invaded the billiard room of Cragside, one of the trust’s Victorian house museums.

Since 2000 catastrophic rainstorms have become so prevalent in England that the trust has gradually retrained its emergency teams to cope with floods, in addition to its time-honored enemy, house fires. Yet at Cragside, as with all of the trust’s 300-plus historic house museums, employees still use a standard British mid-20th-century conservation method — chiefly an electric or hot water heating system that maintains constant humidity levels — to protect irreplaceable treasures, like its painting by J. M. W. Turner and its early Burroughes & Watts billiard table.

nd now, in the photographs Ms. Staniforth viewed in her office, Cragside’s carefully tended electric conservation heating system was standing in a pool of water. So were the 19th-century fire irons and ornate wrought-iron fireplace seating unit, which had both rusted, and the billiard table, whose legs would take several months to dry out. (The room finally reopened to the public in late February.) “That photograph made me feel that we had just been fiddling while Rome burned — or, rather, flooded,” Ms. Staniforth said. “It made me see how important it is to get your priorities right, and not to worry exclusively about the humidity when your house can fill up with water as a result of climate change.”

China issued a fresh heatwave alert Wednesday as soaring temperatures -- some of them record highs -- were again forecast for large swathes of the nation, sparking concerns about power shortages.The National Meteorological Centre warned that large parts of northern and central China would again be hit by "sweltering heat and very little rain", with temperatures set to hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).It set the heat alert at "orange" -- the second-highest rating on a four-colour scale.The extreme heat, which began at the weekend in most areas, has led to hospital wards packed with people suffering from heat-related illnesses, a surge in air-conditioner sales and even a plague of locusts in Inner Mongolia.

Zookeepers

used giant ice blocks to keep animals cool, the Xinhua news agency reported.In several cities including Beijing, where the temperature hit 40.6 degrees Celsius on Monday, authorities reported that overheated vehicles had caught fire, state media said.The heatwave comes after torrential rains in June, mainly in southern parts of the nation, caused massive floods and landslides that killed at least 266 people.The soaring temperatures have led to fears of power shortages in several provinces due to high demand for air conditioning, the state-run Global Times reported.In the southern city of Guangzhou, authorities had opened nearly 500 shelters equipped with air-conditioning units and water for people to escape the heat, the report said.Water demand has also soared along with the high temperatures.In Beijing on Monday, nearly three million cubic metres of water was pumped into the capital, the largest single-day usage since tap water was brought into operation in 1910, the China Daily reported.Authorities in the capital said they would double a "high temperature" subsidy for people working outside in the heat, or whose workplaces were hotter than 33 degrees Celsius.Those who work outside will now get an extra 120 yuan (18 dollars) a month, while people in hot indoor places will be paid 90 yuan, the report said.

Sizzling Moscow shrouded in polluting smog

A cloud of harmful smog has enveloped Moscow, raising airborne pollutants to four times the norm, officials said Wednesday, and prompting doctors to urge residents to stay indoors as the city swelters in a record heat wave.

A heat wave has hit central Russia breaking temperature records going higher than 30 C (86 F) for four weeks breaking all records for the last 130 years and smoke from burning forests around Moscow has reached the city.

July 2010 has become the hottest month on record in Moscow, a source in the city's meteorological bureau said on Friday. A heat wave has gripped Moscow since mid-June and there are no signs the temperatures will fall below 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) in the near future. "Temperatures like this have not been recorded in 130 years," the source said adding that next week temperatures may reach 38 degrees Celsius (over 100 degrees Fahrenheit). The worst drought in almost three decades came to the Moscow Region, which is also suffering from forest fires. The heat forced Muscovites to bathe in the city's fountains and to choose light beachwear for outings and even subway trips. Women abandoned high-heeled shoes in favor of flats and rushed to buy swimsuits forcing shops to order new batches of bikinis. The lucky owners of country houses, or dachas, have raided shops and online stores for inflatable pools, while it is almost impossible to buy an air conditioner or a ventilator in Moscow. Due to the heat, the Army has allowed its soldiers to roll up their sleeves and unbutton their shirts.

Severe and persistent drought held southern Russia in its grip in June and July 2010. Low rainfall and hot temperatures damaged 32 percent of the country’s grain crops, said Russian Agriculture Minister, Yelena Skrynnik on July 23. This satellite vegetation index image, made from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, shows the damage done to plants throughout southern Russia. A previously published image of land surface temperatures shows extreme heat in the drought region at the same time. The vegetation index is a reflection of photosynthesis. The index is high in areas where plants are dense, with plenty of photosynthesizing leaves. The index is low when plants are thin or not present. This image is a vegetation index anomaly image that compares photosynthesis between June 26 and July 11, 2010, to average conditions observed in late June and early July between 2000 and 2009. Below-average plant growth is shown in brown, while average growth is cream-colored. If there had been above-average growth in the region, it would have been represented in green. The land around the Volga River is brown in this image. Plants throughout the region were stressed, producing fewer leaves and photosynthesizing less between June 26 and July 11, 2010. The image is speckled brown. In the large image, which covers a broader region in more detail than the web image, the dots are clearly fields of crops. Here, the dots blend together to reveal a broad region of drought-affected crops. The Volga region is one of Russia’s primary spring wheat-growing areas. The vegetation index values shown here were the lowest late-June values seen in Russia’s spring wheat zone since the MODIS sensor began taking measurements in 2000, said an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Foreign Agricultural Service. Largely as a result of the drought, the USDA expected Russia’s overall wheat crop to be 14 percent smaller than in 2009. The drought affects more than Russian farmers. Russia is the world’s fourth largest wheat exporter. If Russia isn’t able to supply as much wheat, the world’s overall wheat supply will drop. With less wheat on the market, wheat prices will go up. As of July 23, wheat futures (the current price for wheat that will be harvested and delivered in September) had risen for four consecutive weeks because of the expected drop in supply of Russian wheat, reported Bloomberg.

USGS researchers found that southern California is the only part of the state that has experienced significant increases in wildfires over the last five decades. Analysis shows that this increase is linked to the rise in atmospheric temperature. Past studies suggest that wildfire activity has increased throughout the western United States. USGS researchers wanted to know whether this pattern has region-specific variations and causes. For the analysis, they divided California into five climate zones and looked at how number of wildfires and area burned have changed over the past 49 years. But this study did not find statewide increases in wildfires. Only southern California experienced increases in fires and area burned. Curiously, the increases are not linked to that region’s enormous change in population growth. However, for northern California, analysis shows that wildfire trends have links to population trends. This research gives new perspectives on wildfire trends in California. The results will inform urban and natural resource planners on their long-term outlook on wildfire management.

Wheat prices have staged the most drastic rise in more than 50 years, as a drought in Russia fuels growing worries that it could lead to a global shortage of the grain. Harsh heat and a lack of rain in Russia have killed half of the crop in some hard-hit areas. The slump in production in one of the world's most fertile breadbaskets has pushed prices up 62% since early June, and last month saw the biggest and fastest increase since 1959.

Killer heat hits Korea, little relief this month

The temperature in South Jeolla hit highs of 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit) at the start of the month.

“We are considering announcing the number of heat fatalities on a weekly basis,” said an official at the Health Ministry, “to inform the public of the danger outside.”According to ministry records, 24 people rushed to emergency rooms on Aug. 2 and 3 had no other health problems. Another 16 who went to the hospital had conditions that were made worse by the heat.

"We have seen a decrease in crane numbers due to a lack of tubers called nang, which the crane feed upon, which were destroyed by floods last year.