(Voice of America – James Brooke – Dec. 3, 2012 – James Brooke is VOA Moscow bureau chief, covering Russia and the former USSR) It snowed in Russia last week. (Yawn. What else is new?) But Russia no longer is Dr. Zhivago country, a rural place where troika sleighs slide smoothly across white, wintry landscapes. Modern Russians have a deep, […]
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DOHA, December 6 (RIA Novosti) Russia reaffirmed on Thursday its decision to withdraw from the second period of commitment to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but said it would stick to its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent in the next decade. “In 2013, our country will begin implementation of its commitments to reduce greenhouse […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Alina Lobzina – Dec. 5, 2012) Muscovites are to brace for the coldest winter in 20 years, a weather forecast service warned on Wednesday. “It will be like in the good old times snowy and frosty, with no deviations,” a representative of the Fobos weather center told RIA Novosti. Winter seasons when Muscovites wade […]
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(Voice of America – James Brooke – Nov. 28, 2012) MOSCOW Americans may have seen the downside of climate change when Hurricane Sandy bashed into New Jersey and New York City in October. Some scientists say melting Arctic ice helped to create the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. Russians and Chinese, however, see an upside to ice melting in […]
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(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Alex Morales – November 27, 2012) Thawing permafrost threatens to intensify global warming, sending the planet beyond the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of increases that envoys at United Nations climate talks have set as a maximum. Frozen soils that cover a quarter of the land area in the northern hemisphere contain 1,700 gigatons […]
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[Scientists say new signs of global warming in Russian Arctic – AFP – November 22, 2012 – click here for full article] AFP covers warming in the Russian Arctic: The Russian Arctic is losing ice cover and being inhabited by species from the south in the latest sign of climate change, according to a group of Russian scientists. * * […]
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ASTANA. Nov 21 (Interfax) – A Siberian white crane from the project backed by President Vladimir Putin has been sent from Borovoye in the Kazakh northern Akmola region to Russia, the Kazakh Agriculture Ministry reported on Wednesday. Russian ornithologists will bring the crane back home. “An Akmola regional forestry and hunting inspection officer kept the crane at his Borovoye home […]
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(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Alexey Eremenko – October 29, 2012) It is cheaper to send a rocket into space than to drill a single oil well in the Arctic Sea. One Proton rocket launch costs from $80 million to $100 million, while offshore oil wells in the Arctic come in at $100 million to $150 million apiece and […]
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(Business New Europe – bne.eu – Ben Aris in Moscow – October 31, 2012) Exactly 200 years ago this month, Napoleon rode out of Moscow with what was left of the Grande Armée, having failed to crush the Russian army, only to be famously defeated himself by the Russian winter. Given the love of round number anniversaries by the press […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – October 22, 2012) With weather forecasters promising a rapid dip in Moscow’s temperature, traffic police urged drivers Monday not to delay installing winter tires on their cars ahead of an expected first frost. “With the arrival of fall, weather conditions have definitely become worse, which demands drivers be extra careful on the roads,” traffic police […]
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MOSCOW. Oct 18 (Interfax) – Russia should stay in the Kyoto Protocol; its possible secession will have negative consequences, Greenpeace Russia Program Director Ivan Blokov told Interfax on Thursday. “The Kyoto Protocol is important to Russia. The world will shift to a low-hydrocarbon economy just the same. If we disregard the Kyoto Protocol and keep using fossil fuel, we will […]
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(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Roland Oliphant – October 18, 2012) President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered a review of Russia’s involvement in the Kyoto Protocol, raising the possibility that the country could finally “wave goodbye” to the climate treaty altogether. “We have to admit that we did not get any special benefits from the Kyoto Protocol in the commercial sense,” […]
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ST. PETERSBURG, October 17 (RIA Novosti)-The record reduction in Arctic pack-ice this year has created favorable conditions for year-long navigation along the Northern Sea Route (NSR) in 2013, offering major savings to shipping operators, Russia’s Arctic Institute said on Wednesday. The ice coverage in the Arctic reached its record minimum of 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) in […]
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(Interfax – October 3, 2012) Russian environmentalists have poured cold water on claims by the head of the country’s main security service that Al-Qa’idah was responsible for forest fires in a number of countries across the European Union over the summer. In remarks reported by the privately-owned Interfax news agency on 3 October, Aleksandr Bortnikov, head of the Federal Security […]
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Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – Roland Oliphant – October 4, 2012 The Altai republic and Chechnya have the cleanest economies in Russia, according to a new index released Tuesday. The index, put together by WWF Russia and state-owned news agency RIA-Novosti with the support of the Russian Geographic Society, is one of the first attempts to combine environmental threat factors, […]
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RIA Novosti – September 19, 2012 The Russian authorities’ decision to bring to an end the work of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been widely commented by Russian political analysts, opposition politicians and human rights activists. Analysts The closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) operation in Russia is a disturbing signal which indicates that […]
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