Last year was the warmest in Russia’s recorded history, the national weather service said this month as global temperatures reached record highs.
Russia’s weather service said 2020 was among the country's 14 hottest years, all of which were recorded in the 21st century. Average temperatures across the country’s 11 time zones were 2 degrees Celsius or more above normal, Russia’s Meteorological Service announced on Jan. 6.
The highest anomaly of 7 C above normal was observed on Siberia’s Taymyr peninsula, the northernmost part of the Asian continent, it said. Temperatures in European and Asian Russia were around 3 degrees above normal.
“An absolute maximum has been reached for the first time in the entire 130-year history of regular weather observations in every federal district of the country, with the exception of the North Caucasus,” the Meteorological Service said.
The Urals and Siberian federal districts beat previous temperature records by 1.5 C, while Moscow’s record average of 8 C in 2020 was also 3 degrees above normal.
The world as a whole saw average temperatures of 14.9 C in 2020, rivaling a record set in 2016 and closing what the UN called the warmest decade ever recorded.
Russia, the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter with an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas, is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the world due to its vast Arctic territories.
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