By Anton Troianovski : nytimes – excerpt
Wildfires are spreading. The mosquitoes are ravenous. People are shielding their windows from the midnight sun with foil and blankets.
MOSCOW — They used to ride snowmobiles in June in Russkoye Ustye, a Siberian village by the Arctic Ocean coast.
Last week, the temperature in the area hit 88 degrees.
“Nature is taking its revenge on us, probably,” Sergei Portnyagin, the village head, said by telephone. “We’ve been too bloody in how we’ve treated it.”
The climate has been warming rapidly in the Arctic for years, but even by those standards, a heat wave roasting northern Siberia for the past few weeks has been shocking… (more)