Russia and Climate Change Forecasts

2030.  Permafrost melting by 2030 could cause severe damage to Russian defense infrastructure, assets and resources.  “Defense infrastructure, including key airfields, oil storage facilities and strategic oil reservoirs, could all be destroyed if the hard permafrost covering the ground year-round across Russia's far north melts by 2030, Russia's First Deputy Emergencies Minister Ruslan Tsalikov told the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, Thursday.  Tsalikov described as a catastrophe the damage that would result from widespread permafrost melting, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.  Russia's widespread coniferous forests also could be inundated by flooding and unprecedented warmer weather triggered by climate change, Tsalikov said.  If the annual temperature rises by one or two degrees ... the permafrost could decrease 50 percent, Tsalikov said."

"The risk of flooding would also double, he said, according to the RIA Novosti report.  Global warming could also cost Russia its huge supplies of methane gas trapped beneath the permafrost, believed to be almost one third of the entire world's reserves, RIA Novosti said.  The news agency said West Siberia's permafrost was currently disappearing at the rate of 4 centimeters per year. That would cause the permafrost's southern boundaries to retreat by an average of nearly 50 miles across northern Russia over the next 20 years [2010-2030], the report said.” (Martin Sieff, UPI News Service, “Russia Defense Watch: Melting ice menace,” UPI International Intelligence, June 23, 2008)