Russia: Global Warming Long Held To Be Western Conspiracy, But Medvedev's Sweaty Statement Stunning

[hatrack]

EDIT

At a meeting of international sporting officials in Moscow on July 30, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that in 14 regions of the country, "practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot." Then, as TV cameras zoomed in on the perspiration shining on his forehead, Medvedev announced, "What's happening with the planet's climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate." (See pictures of Medvedev and Vladimir Putin on vacation.)

For Medvedev, such sentiments mark a striking about-face. Only last year, he announced that Russia, the world's third largest polluter after China and the U.S., would be spewing 30% more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere by 2020. "We will not cut our development potential," he said during the summer of 2009 (an unusually mild one), just a few months before attending the Copenhagen climate summit, which in December failed to reach a substantial agreement on how to limit carbon emissions.

But even that pronouncement, grim as it seemed to the organizers of the Copenhagen talks, was mild compared with the broader Russian campaign against the idea that global warming is taking place. Two months before Copenhagen, state-owned Channel One television aired a documentary called The History of a Deception: Global Warming, which argued that the notion of man-made climate change was the result of an international media conspiracy. A month later, hackers sparked the so-called Climategate scandal by stealing e-mails from European climate researchers. The hacked e-mails, which were then used to support the arguments of global-warming skeptics, appeared to have been distributed through a server in the Siberian oil town of Tomsk, raising suspicion among some environmental activists of Russia's involvement in the leak. (See TIME's Ecocentric blog for more on Climategate.)

"Broadly speaking, the Russian position has always been that climate change is an invention of the West to try to bring Russia to its knees," says Vladimir Chuprov, director of the Greenpeace energy department in Moscow. Case in point: when Medvedev visited Tomsk last winter, he called the global-warming debate "some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects." That was two months after the Copenhagen talks. But Medvedev's climate-sensitive comments on Friday, Chuprov says, could finally mark the start of a policy shift. "You don't just throw comments like that around when you are the leader of the nation, and if you look at what is happening with this heat wave, it's horrible. It's clearly enough to shake people out of their delusions about global warming."

EDIT

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2008081,00.html

[sharp_stick]

1. Idiots have to be hit over the head

many times before they see what's actually happening in front of them. I keep wondering if Senator Inhofe is going to try to drag his grandkids out to build another fucking igloo this year?

[BrklynLiberal]

2. I heard on the radio yesterday that Moscow has had triple digit days...

something that has NEVER happened before. Guess they are getting the hint.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. duh..message says it was not posted. I repost..and it is there twice.

[drm604]

4. I never realized that the country of Russia was one of the deniers.

Hopefully this will weaken the denial movement somewhat.

[hatrack]

5. It'll all be forgotten as soon as the first snow flies . . .

Such is the quality of denial.

[tom_paine]

6. Once again, Commies and Bushies show striking similarity of behavior

Why am I not suprised?

For me, personally, one of the reasons I tipped over into full-fleged hatred of the Rw Authoritarian movement in this country is that is so often speaks and acts like the LW Communist Authoritarians it pretends to despise.