Mushrooms Sprouting, Bears Wide Awake In Russia's Warmest Nov-Dec Ever Recorded - AFP

[hatrack]

MOSCOW (AFP) - There is not quite the drama of a Florida hurricane, or the poignancy of stranded polar bears, but Moscow babushka Larisa Bilik is struggling to sell her wool socks -- and global warming, experts say, is also to blame. The warmest November-December since records began has put Russia's fearsome winter on the back foot.

Mushrooms are sprouting outside Moscow, bears are unable to hibernate, and Bilik, who looks older than her 53 years, is having trouble attracting customers to her stall in the city centre, where she hawks thick socks, slippers and fake fur vests. "When it's cold, they buy, when it's warm they don't," she says, gold teeth flashing against the gloomy, almost permanent twilight that has oppressed sunless -- and snowless -- Moscow for several weeks.

Gennady Yeliseyev, deputy director of the state's weather service, the Gidrometeocentre, said that since November 20 Russia has experienced the warmest temperatures since records began in the 1870s. "Average temperatures for the first 10 days of December are minus five degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) and the current abnormalities range as high as plus 10 degrees Celsius (50 Fahrenheit)," he said. "This is the weather we'd normally have in late October."

EDIT

Although temperatures will inevitably drop -- wet snow could start falling in Moscow this week, according to forecasters -- weird things are already happening in a country synonymous with harsh, long winters. In far away Siberia, the ice has begun to melt and break up along a 155-mile (250-kilometre) stretch of the great river Yenise. At the Moscow zoo, warm temperatures are prompting birds into the love making usually reserved for spring, while the brown bear couple Mushir and Rosa are grumpily insomniac as they wait for snow and hibernation.

EDIT

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061214/sc_afp/russiaweather_061214061838

[blm]

1. Heartbreaking. So much to do and so little time to try and turn it around.

.

[redqueen]

2. we have no idea what we've done,

and no way to know precisely what changes are still to come

interesting times, indeed