Short Wave - How Record Heat In Siberia Is Messing With...Everything

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Climate change and this year's weather patterns are behind the record-breaking heat in Siberia. NPR Climate Reporter Rebecca Hersher tells us how it's contributed to all sorts of problems there — mosquito swarms, buckling roads, wildfires. And we'll hear how these high temps are threatening the livelihoods of Indigenous Russians.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, Rebecca Hersher, NPR climate reporter. Hello, Maddie Sofayle, woman on a mission. Did you know that I have been watching a lot of alarming videos lately? I did not, and that's not what I expected you to ask me. Go on. Okay, just bear with me. Can we listen to one of them? What does this sound like to you?

Uh, like the, like the blizzard. Lair Witch Project? A lot of shuffling. I don't know. It's a good guess. So it's the sound of someone walking through a swarm of mosquitoes. So many that they're like coating the wall of this shed. Like they look like paint. No. Yes. And this is not the only video like this. There's a whole part of the 2020 internet in between like the pandemic and everything else that is terrible. Yes. That is just about the mosquito season in. Siberia. Hmm.

One of my favorites is this video from early June. It's in the Al-Tai, like southern Siberia, near Mongolia. And the person in this video is wearing a rain jacket with the hood up, rain pants. They're sitting on the edge of an inflatable boat. They put their hand down into the boat and scoop out a handful of live mosquitoes. No. Like his hand is just covered in them. And he says, I just killed about a thousand mosquitoes.

And what I love about this video is that he can't stop giggling about it. Even though it's like, it's so unpleasant. Yeah. And they're like flying into his mouth. He's like spitting them out as he talks. But he and his friend who's shooting the video are both just like laughing so hard. So I have heard of some pretty intense mosquito issues in my day. But this feels like it's a bit.

above and beyond. Like, why is this happening? Why are you making us think of these things? So the reason I've been watching these videos and the reason it's happening is because Russia, and especially Siberia, are having their hottest year ever recorded. Temperatures in the 90s, even pushing 100 degrees all the way up above the Arctic Circle. In some places, it's 20, even 30 degrees hotter than the normal average. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know it got that hot up there. You know what I mean? Well, it doesn't, except it is. Right. And it's, not like a heat wave or it gets cooler after a week or two. This is months. Like it got warmer than it usually does earlier in the year and it has stayed abnormally hot in the region for months, which means

a nice, long, warm season for mosquitoes to procreate. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Okay. You didn't have to do that with the iceberg. You're welcome. Okay, so today on the show how climate change is messing with mosquitoes, trees, and reindeer. And how Siberia's hottest year ever is directly threatening the livelihoods and the health of many people who live there. Okay, Becky, so let's talk about this record-breaking heat in Russia. Is this the first time something like this has happened? Because I haven't ever heard of this before.

Yeah, so it's not the first time it's happened, but it's the most intense the heat has ever been. Gotcha. So basically, summers in Siberia have been getting steadily hotter on average for decades. And that's because of climate change, obviously. The Earth is almost two degrees warmer now than it was before the Industrial Revolution. And the poles are heating up much faster than the rest of the planet. So especially the parts of Siberia that are very far north, so-called Arctic Russia, that's been heating up pretty quickly. So, like, what's going on this year? Well, what's happening this year is that the weather patterns are keeping cold air up around the North Pole. So basically, the wind pattern that goes in a circle around the North Pole is really tight and strong.

So you don't get that cold air coming down farther south into Russia to provide some relief from the heat. Got it. So you take that like warming trend and combine it with this year's weather patterns and you get this record breaking heat. Yep, exactly. And I talked to Robert Rodee about this. He's the head of Berkeley Earth. I studies global climate trends. You know, they're experiencing temperatures right now, which we would expect would be normal around 2,100, the way climate change has been going. Oh, wow.

Okay. So this year is like a sneak peek of Russia's possible future. So besides helping mosquitoes make lots of babies, how does that heat affect people who live in Siberia? In so many ways. So, for example, buildings are collapsing. Wow. I called Bathsheba Dumuth about this. She's a historian at Brown University.

She studies, this is interesting, the ecological history of the Arctic. Infrastructure in this part of the north is mostly built on permafrost. So on this layer of ground that's mostly frozen year-round, sometimes the surface layer thaws, but the main base of it is frozen, you know, 365 days out of the year. And when you have these really warm periods, the permafrost starts melting at a much quicker rate, and it destabilizes the foundations of people's houses. And it's not just houses, although that is very scary if it's your house. Roads, railroads can buckle. This spring oil storage tanks collapsed in northern Siberia and dumped tons of oil into a river.

That's awful. Yeah, it's a big disaster. And on top of that, there are the mammals that some people relatively. rely on for food. So Dumuth is really an expert on the people who live in the Russian Far East. That's the part of Siberia that's right across the Bering Strait from Alaska. And many of the people who live there are indigenous Russians who rely on ice to hunt for animals. So there's concern about people being able to hunt on the sea ice if you're in a community that has historically hunted walruses and seals.

And then farther west, mostly, there are a lot of indigenous Russians who raise reindeer her. Reindeer are animals that are adapted to the ice age. They like it cold and find this weather extremely trying. So reindeer are more likely to get sick, more likely to die, less able to reproduce successfully when it's really hot, which puts people's livelihoods in immediate danger. Okay, so the heat is messing with roads, buildings, you know, humans and animals. Can we also talk about these wildfires that I've been hearing about? because it seems like those have been pretty intense.

Yes. So, and this is not the first year. So last year was a record-breaking year for wildfires in the Russian Arctic. And this year is even worse. That's according to the European Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service. Are these fires different than the natural fire that's kind of part of the forest ecosystems? The fire we think of is healthy fire. Yeah, in a lot of cases, they are.

What's really concerning scientists say is the intensity and the frequency. of these fires. That can damage forests, like, when there isn't enough time for the ecosystem to recover. Gotcha. And these really large fires, they can also contribute significantly to global warming because when Arctic areas or boreal forests, which is the type of northern forests in Siberia, when they burn, they release a lot of carbon. Like more carbon than other wildfires in different places? Because I think, like in my brain, I would think that fires in tropical areas would release more carbon dioxide because everything grows more quickly in the rainforest, so there's more to burn? Yeah, I thought the exact same thing, and it's wrong. It's actually the opposite. But I had to

call a forest ecologist, help me understand this. Her name is Amber Soya. She studies Siberian forest fires at NASA. Siberia and boreal regions in general, this is where most of the terrestrial carbon is stored. this might not be something that you hear because you generally think of the tropics. And the tropics are incredibly productive. And so they take in a lot of carbon, but they also release a lot of carbon. So if you're a leaf and you, you know, fall or anything in tropical forest, decomposers decompose you immediately. In contrast, the boreal forest is cold a lot of the year. Therefore, you don't don't have a lot of decomposers decomposing, but in the summer, there's a lot of daylight,

and there's a lot of vegetation growing. So if you're a leaf for whatever falls, twig, you partially decompose, you don't completely decompose. And this material stacks up, and it's been stacking up for hundreds of years for millennia. So we have all this carbon that is stored in the forest floor in Arctic and boreal systems. Okay, okay. So basically, because decomposition works better in warm places, hashtag bacteria, these colder Arctic forests have all this partially decomposed material that's built up over, let's say, hundreds of years. So when that burns, they're releasing like hundreds of years of carbon. Yeah, nailed it.

Okay, okay. So here's what I want to know, Herscher. What are we supposed to do with this information? Like, how do we look at all of this and imagine a future for the Arctic that's anything but fire and bugs? Right. Yeah, I totally hear you. Like, climate change in the Arctic is so relentlessly sad. In so many ways, global warming is undermining ecosystems. It's making people's lives harder.

But then, for this story, I talked to somebody who sees things differently. And it's somebody kind of surprising. who I might not think of this way. Hello, Rebecca. Good morning. How are you? I'm fine, waiting for your call. Well, I appreciate you. I know you don't usually talk about your work in English.

The last time I spoke English was in December. But I tried to use any chance to talk. I mean, she's crushing it, to be honest. Oh, yeah. Her English is flawless. Nadia Chabakova is a climate scientist, at the Institute of Forests at the Russian Academy of Sciences. It's in the central Siberian city of Krasnjarsk, and she's been there for 50 years.

She lives with a lot of the things we've been talking about, like sees things change year after year. And a few years ago, she published a scientific paper that specifically asked, how sustainable is it, for humans to live in this part of the world? We have been studying this question for pretty long time.

maybe 20, 30 years. She and two colleagues, including Amber Soya from NASA, looked back at decades of science about everything we're talking about here, forests and fires and health, pests and food and infrastructure, and they concluded that many parts of Siberia are going to be more populated in the future. They're going to get more desirable as the Earth gets hotter, not less. Huh. Okay. So that's like, that's kind of complicated, right, Becky? Because obviously we're talking about all these negative aspects of climate change. But at the same time, there are changes that could potentially help people, for example, live more easily in a place like Siberia. Yeah, exactly. It's this tension. You know, there's a lot of really cold wilderness where it's hard to grow stuff right now in Siberia, for example. Global warming will make it easier to grow some things. We'll make the winter is shorter.

and more mild, which will likely appeal to some people, especially to people who might be displaced from places that get dangerously hot as the climate changes, you know, places further south. Right. And Chabakova says that means Russia will need to invest in Siberia, which has not historically happened. And it's also impossible to know who will be the winners and the losers of a warmer Siberian future. So either way, they'll need to build roads and homes that don't buckle as the ground thaws. they'll need to manage forests so they don't burn every year and develop the land in ways that can be sustainably supporting food production.

Of course, all developments are dependent on investments in infrastructure and agriculture. And these decisions should be made just in the near future. Because climate change rate is, very, very ripen. So basically she's saying this could happen, but it needs to happen pretty fast. Yeah, and it will have to happen carefully, because if

you develop wrong, you can make the problem worse. Okay, Becky Hersher, I appreciate you. I learned a lot today. I'll say that. You know what, Maddie, me too, about bacteria. This episode was produced by Abby Wendell, fact-checked by Burley-McCoy,

and edited by Viet Le. I'm Maddie Safia. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.