Russia: Who’s to blame for the summer of fire?

Russia is suffocating under “weeks of unprecedented heat,” said Vladimir Isachenkov in The Moscow Times. Wildfires are burning out of control across vast areas, torching entire villages. The “poisonous smog” smothers cities and the people who live in them. In Moscow alone, the combination of intense heat and polluted air has doubled the death rate, to 700 people a day. Meanwhile, fire and drought have devastated the country’s agriculture, destroying at least 10 million hectares of wheat. The Russian Meteorological Center says that judging from soil deposits and historical documents, this summer’s heat wave is the worst in 1,000 years. “Our ancestors haven’t observed or registered a heat like this,” said head meteorologist Alexander Frolov. “This phenomenon is absolutely unique.”

Some scientists believe this “scorching Egyptian heat” was caused by a U.S. attack using a “climate weapon,” said Svetlana Kuzina in Komsomolskaya Pravda. They blame a “secret antenna complex” in Alaska, a facility the U.S. calls the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program station. The station, a field studded with 70-foot antennas, ostensibly conducts research on the ionosphere. But experts say it is really “a geophysical or ionospheric weapon.” Why else would it be run by the U.S. military, rather than by a university or independent scientific body? Ever since 1997, when the HAARP began operation, Russia and other countries have experienced severe weather phenomena, including unusually strong hurricanes and earthquakes, and, most recently, volcanic eruptions.

If only that conspiracy theory were true, said Andrey Serenko in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Then we could loosen the grip of this heat by bombing HAARP. Unfortunately, our less kooky scientists agree that the intense heat is a result of global warming. “And that means that every new summer will become an increasingly difficult test for Russia.” Consequently, we can expect the environment to become a top issue in politics. In 2008, President Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia would drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, though little was done. Now, the public will demand more “preventive measures against the heat.” That may finally push Russia to join the worldwide fight against global warming.

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The heat may be a consequence of climate change, but the fires are not, said Vedomosti in an editorial. Russia is burning today because Russian officials failed to take two simple preventive measures: reclaiming marshland and providing adequate funds for a fire service. In Soviet times, peat bogs were drained and “dried out en masse,” enabling peat to be used as an industrial fuel source. When the country switched to oil and gas, the dried marshes were abandoned, essentially becoming so much kindling. “If the government had concerned itself in a timely manner with the reclamation of the marshes,” most of the fires wouldn’t have started. And if it had bought enough firefighting gear, those fires that did start could have been contained. At this point, however, Russians have only “one consolation—sooner or later, the Russian winter will come.”