By Ines Ware
Environmental and climate groups (1Sky included) are gearing up to push for climate action during the congressional recess, even if it means showing up at the office doors of senators who have failed to respond to climate change. Also, advocates will put the pressure on lawmakers to defend the EPA's efforts under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. Climate advocates are currently battling Senator Jay Rockefeller and his "Dirty Air Act pt2" which will cripple the EPA's ability to regulate pollution for two years. 1Sky is mentioned in the New York Times for our shadowing events.
Russia Feels the Effects of Global Warming
Russia is feeling the burn this summer with temperatures topping 100° Fahrenheit for the first time. When I think about Russia, I think about blizzards and Russian snow hats. However, Russians are actually undergoing such an extreme heat wave that even President Dmitry Medvedev is convinced of climate change. His epiphany was spurred by an extreme heat wave which is blazing into its second month, a drought that has ruined a third of Russia's crops and wildfires that have blanketed half of European Russia. The Prime Minister has even banned grain exports from August 15 to December 31. Even more, numbers of deaths per day in Moscow has doubled to 700 due to this heat wave. I would say that Russians are now pretty convinced. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that Russia could experience a doubling of disastrous droughts, see catastrophic fires and suffer large crop loss in this century. I would say they were pretty accurate in 2007.
Our country has not experienced such a heat wave in the last 50 or even 100 years... Everyone is talking about climate change now... Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past." -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
His translated speech can be found here.
