Climate Experts Agree: Global Warming Caused Russian Heat Wave

As Russia chokes from a heat wave of unprecedented ferocity, president Dmitry Medvedev has strengthened his call for the world’s leaders to take action to fight global warming pollution. The scientific community has warned for decades that burning coal and oil without limit would intensify heat waves, droughts, and floods. Now that the planet is at its hottest in recorded history, freak climate disasters are arriving with increasing frequency. Some scientists are now stating the obvious: Russia’s heat wave simply would not have happened without the influence of fossil fuel pollution on our atmosphere. University of Texas climate scientist Michael Tobis is “hazarding a guess” that “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change”:

But right now I feel like hazarding a guess. As far as I understand, nothing like this has happened before in Moscow. . . . The formerly remarkable heat wave of 2001, then, is “the sort of thing we’ll see more of” with global warming. But it may turn out reasonable, in the end, to say “the Russian heat wave of 2010 is the first disaster unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change.”

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