In the coming years, there will be no frosty winter or hot summer in the central part of Russia; in the coming decades, the climate will continue to warm on the planet, and in thousands of years another ice age will come. The head of the laboratory of climatology at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Geography, Andrey Shmakin, spoke about such assumptions of scientists regarding climate change
Greenhouse Russian winter
Which year, for residents of the central part of Russia, winter begins with freezing temperatures and rain. What's going on with the weather?
On the one hand, such a temperature at the end of November is, of course, higher than normal. On the other hand, given that such deviations have been observed for 20 years, the above zero temperature at this time can be considered the norm. Warming is underway, and in the Moscow region it manifests itself precisely during the period traditionally considered cold. The warmest of all is winter, with the beginning of spring and the end of autumn taking the second role in this process. Summer doesn't get warmer at all.
What is the reason for the establishment of a new norm, which many residents of central Russia still perceive more as an anomaly?
As the English say, good question. We ourselves do not really know the answer. Only the direct cause of such thaws is known. Daily weather is shaped by air masses, which most often come from the Atlantic, sometimes from the Arctic Ocean, Central Asia or Africa. This kind of cloudy, rainy, relatively warm weather is brought by Atlantic cyclones, the number and intensity of which have increased over the past decades. Moreover, these cyclones bring warm weather and precipitation in winter, and, on the contrary, cooling in summer, but also with precipitation. The consequences of these processes are ambiguous. In Siberia, for example, there is an even more intense warming than in Moscow, but there the temperature, for example, was -25, and became -23, that is, it still remains very cold. And if warming brings precipitation to Moscow in the form of rain,then to Siberia - in the form of a large amount of snow. Due to this, the height of the snow cover in Russia as a whole is increasing. What caused such complex, nonlinear processes in the formation and movement of air masses, scientists cannot yet explain. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are considered to play a very strong role. Undoubtedly, natural factors also contribute, for example, solar radiation, the mechanisms of action of which are much less studied than the influence of humans. A lot of things are mixed here, so you need to investigate everything in a complex, see how anthropogenic and natural mechanisms interact, how each of them affects climate change.scientists cannot explain yet. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are considered to play a very strong role. Undoubtedly, natural factors also contribute, for example, solar radiation, the mechanisms of action of which are much less studied than the influence of humans. A lot of things are mixed here, so you need to investigate everything in a complex, see how anthropogenic and natural mechanisms interact, how each of them affects climate change.scientists cannot explain yet. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are considered to play a very strong role. Undoubtedly, natural factors also contribute, for example, solar radiation, the mechanisms of action of which are much less studied than the influence of humans. A lot of things are mixed here, so you need to investigate everything in a complex, see how anthropogenic and natural mechanisms interact, how each of them affects climate change.how each of them affects climate change.how each of them affects climate change.
Does climate change affect human health?
The shortest answer to this question is yes. Another thing is how and to what extent this influence is expressed. So far, this topic, which, by the way, is dealt with as a separate area of science - medical meteorology, has not been adequately studied. But it is known that the more intense the cyclonic circulation (and it has become more intense, and this is an indisputable fact), the more often atmospheric pressure drops are observed. For people with cardiovascular diseases, of course, this is a minus. There are also purely meteorological changes - humidity, increased and weakened winds - which also negatively affect some people. In addition, viruses and bacteria are activated during the frost-free period. On the other hand, when the overall winter background temperature becomes higher, the risk of frostbite decreases, which is already a positive point. Also, livestock can graze on the grass longer, and not stand in a stall, which affects the quality of meat and milk, and therefore indirectly on the health of the person who eats these products.
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How does warming affect the economy?
The biggest economic plus: it gives the country great savings in heating resources. There are negative consequences for agriculture, because winter crops in such weather can get wet and partially die, although in general, it is clear that it is better for plants to have a longer warm season. For builders, warming poses some problems. For example, in permafrost conditions, a building is built on piles, but if the layer into which these piles are driven thaws over the summer, then the building is crumbling. Such cases have already happened. But mostly, of course, they were associated not so much with climate change as with the negligence of the builders. In general, I will say this: if a person always behaved reasonably, then the problems of climate change would hardly bother him.
There are many interesting things here. Now there is such a tendency in the world: the damage from natural disasters is growing strongly. However, this is not due not to the fact that there are more natural disasters. It's just that a person began to build in those places that had never occurred to him to master, and, naturally, he began to be affected by the processes that always took place in these places. In particular, until the beginning of the twentieth century, no one lived on the coast of the oceans, but now there are a lot of cities, and as soon as a hurricane or a strong storm begins, everything is flooded, broken by waves, and so on. The man himself is to blame for going where he should not. On the other hand, where should he go? The population is growing, which means that a person is unwillingly built in new places. All this is very difficult in fact …
New ice age
What are the projections for climate change for the coming decades?
They are all approximate and based on the extrapolation of current trends into the future; they do not include the possibility of sudden, unexpected changes in the climate system that would reverse the trends observed today. According to these forecasts, the planet will continue to warm over the next decade. As for the more distant period, the uncertainty of these forecasts increases exponentially, and the reliability, accordingly, decreases. It is possible that some mechanisms may start working, about which we do not know anything at all, or, for example, the mechanisms already known to us will behave in a different way, or factors that act on longer periods of time will turn on. For example, the cycle of climate change is now known for a hundred thousand years, the tendencies of which were studied using glacial cores. According to this data,there is a rather clear curve of warming and cooling with a period of about one hundred thousand years. Four such cycles have passed over the past four hundred thousand years. We are now in a warm phase. If we simply abstract from everything and extrapolate the same curve for the future, in a few thousand years the next phase will come - cooling, the end of which will be a new ice age.
How many thousand years from now?
It is impossible to say for sure. But precisely in thousands of years, and not tens or hundreds, so it is not soon. Then, after all, the daily, annual, ten-year regime of climate change is monitored, which means that it will not come as a surprise. We have a good idea of how the system is moving and behaving now. But, you see, all the previous cycles took place without anthropogenic participation, and no one can predict how the next cycle of one hundred thousand years will be superimposed on anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Do scientists have a version of what the planet's climate will be like at the top of the warming cycle, and when will we get closer to it?
I just talked about a time scale of hundreds of thousands of years, on a scale of one hundred million years we have an almost continuous cooling, that is, the climate curve with some beats, but it goes down. Fifty-sixty million years ago, the Earth was much warmer than it is now, there was no winter, in our understanding, even in the polar latitudes, crocodiles lived in the Arctic. This was the time when deposits of coal, oil and so on were formed. All biomass, which flourished gorgeous at all latitudes and continents, perished and fell in the form of coal and partly oil (although hypotheses are different for oil) deposits. So what to compare with? If we talk about cycles of one hundred thousand years and about the peaks of warming between ice ages, then now we are at a lower point than it was in the "Holocene optimum" - five to six thousand years ago. It was even warmer then than nowrelatively thermophilic plants of the hornbeam type grew on the coast of the White Sea. We did not even get to this level, although such a climate was in the memory of mankind - of course, then we still walked in skins and did not have a written language, but already existed in nature.
The official rate of warming is 0.7 - 0.8 degrees per hundred years on average across the globe. In Russia, the trend is higher, about 1 - 1.2 degrees in a hundred years. But there are also areas where no warming is observed at all, for example, on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, in some areas of the Arctic. In the central region of Russia, an increase in temperature occurs in winter and the adjacent months of spring and autumn, and the bulk of the warm season remained without warming. Moreover, we are now having a very interesting and unexpected process in Central Russia: the frost-free period is shortening. Spring has already come, the snow has melted long ago, trees and bushes are blooming, flowers are blooming, and somewhere in May the last frosts occur! And the first autumn frosts come in September. So, the length of the season between these two events is called the "frost-free period";it is declining in Central Russia, and all warming is located outside its borders. In spring and autumn, outbursts of cold air from the Arctic became more frequent, which comes literally for two days, freezes everything and leaves, or vice versa, warms itself up. Berries, apples, plums and cherries suffer greatly from this.
This means that we will again have a relatively warm winter and a relatively cool summer …
Apparently so. But this is a mechanical forecast based, in essence, on the fact that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. In meteorology, the situation is this: if you say every day that the weather will be the same today as yesterday, then the probability that your forecast will come true is about 60 percent. So you can make bets with friends, and in most cases you will win.