Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks with local residents who lost their homes to fire near Nizhny Novgorod. Photo: AFPRussian Church collects $217,000 in aid for wildfire victims
The Russian Orthodox Church has collected 6.5 million rubles ($217,000) for those affected by wildfires, the Moscow Patriarchate said on its website Monday.
22:22 09/08/2010
Wildfires caused by an extreme heat wave are raging in 22 Russian regions. A total of 52 people died in the fires and 472 have received medical assistance. Over 1,900 houses have burned down, leaving 3,500 Russians without a roof over their heads.22:22 09/08/2010
The Church's Synodal department for charity and social services also invited volunteers to collect and distribute aid to those in need....
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100809/160133678.html
Human influence on the warming of Earth has been recorded since the late 1800s. The change in climate is directly due to the Climate Crisis that is human induced.
Climate change: how to play our hand? (click title to entry - thank you)
There have always been extremes of weather around the world but evidence suggests human influence is changing the odds
Peter Stott
guardian.co.uk
Monday 9 August 2010 16.20 BST
Over the past week or so, Pakistan has been devastated by its worst floods for generations and Moscow has suffered under a blanket of smog after its hottest day in 130 years of records. What is causing these and other recent extreme weather events and are they linked to climate change?
Because of a rare meteorological pattern we can see a connection between extreme weather across Eurasia. Usually, the flow in the upper troposphere over northern India, the Himalayas and Pakistan is dominated by the monsoon anticyclone which pushes the sub-tropical jet to the north of the Tibetan Plateau. This prevents mid-latitude weather systems from penetrating very far south, unlike this year, when active weather systems have spread southwards into Pakistan. Here this has combined with the monsoon to produce record rainfall. The record-breaking high temperatures in Moscow, forest fires and damaged crops are another consequence, as was the excessive rain over China when the Three Gorges Dam almost reached capacity a few short weeks ago....
Another Russian nuclear facility threatened by wildfires
02:35 10/08/2010
Emergency regulations over the threat of spreading wildfires were enforced late on Monday in the town of Ozersk in the Chelyabinsk region, where one of Russia's largest nuclear-waste plants is located.
The Mayak plant, which makes tritium and radioisotopes from decommissioned weapons and waste from nuclear reactors, is about 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from the town of Snezhinsk where a forest fire has recently threatened a major nuclear research center.
"The head of Ozersk administration has enforced emergency regulations in the forests and parks due to a serious wildfire threat," the local administration said in a statement....
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100810/160135776.html
