Diary #6: Blowing hot and cold on climate change
In Yakutia minus 35 degrees centigrade is a warm spring day
Suddenly it’s warm again. Or at least not as cold as last month which you may recall brought record low temperatures across Britain. Minus 15 in Braemar minus 8 in Oxford. Remember the Polar Vortex causing havoc on the Northern Hemisphere? Now we are apparently in an extreme weather event of the other kind. Record warm temperatures have descended upon Europe and the talk on the BBC is all about global warming. The climate sceptics on Twitter, who were out in force with their dodgy graphs before Christmas, are quiet again.
Though don’t expect this warm spell to lower your fuel bills any time soon. Bankruptcy is already baked in. This is because we are dependent on imported gas at a world market price set, ultimately, by Vladimir Putin. Anyway we’ll probably have another cold wave before April.
But it probably won’t be as cold as it has been in Oymyakon in the Yakutia republic of Siberia which is the coldest village on earth. Here the temperature can fall to minus 71 degrees. Centigrade. Minus 40 is a balmy spring day. It is colder here than the North Pole - so cold in fact that children are wrapped up like Michelin Men and even then allowed out for only ten minutes in winter. After that their knees freeze.
Household water comes from blocks of ice because it is not possible to lay pipes in the permafrost. For the same reason most houses have outdoor toilets. Which means you’d have make sure you go about your business pretty quick if you want to return intact from the outhouse. No sitting around reading that endless article from the London Review of Books. It might be your last.
But people in Yakutia seem to live pretty well on the whole and look and sound just like us. The biggest city in the region, Yakutsk, has a population the size of Edinburgh. It somehow manages to have outdoor markets. People in Yakutia are required to eat vast quantities of meat and cream to keep them warm throughout the day - vegans would die in minutes.
There is a lot of wild swimming too, which beggars belief. On Epiphany, 19th January, “Walruses”, as they are called, go poking holes in the ice all over Siberia. But the water is much warmer than the air so they have to be careful not to freeze when they get out. Throw a jug of boiling water in the air in Yakutsk and it turns to ice before it lands.
But Millennials do worry about climate change. Yakutsk is having a heatwave right now with temperatures forecast at a scorching minus 35 degrees. This time last year it was minus 64 degrees centigrade in Yakutsk. Only it is hard to obsess about global warming when your energies are devoted to managing the cold. Much as is the case in the UK right now where many poorer families are finding it too expensive to heat their homes.
Yakutians don’t live in igloos by the way. Even in the remoter villages people live in solid wooden houses with triple-glazed windows which are probably warmer than my flat in Edinburgh. This is because Yakutia is sitting on prodigious reserves of natural gas which is piped by the government into every home. No one talks about heat pumps.
Yakutia, or the Republic of Sakha as it’s officially called, has around 12 trillion cubic metres of gas and 2.6 billion tons of oil. It is a major exporter of the stuff. Just as we were back in the day. It is hard to believe that the UK was self sufficient in gas as recently as 2003.
You’ll have noticed that neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer in their New Year speeches made any promises about fuel bills returning return to normal. That’s because a lot of the gas that used to come west from Russia has stopped coming because of the energy war in Ukraine.
Which is why the UK is going to start drilling again in the North Sea, whether Nicola Sturgeon likes it or not. As in Yakutia we have been reminded that much-maligned fossil fuels are still essential to civilised life, indeed to life itself. And they will remain a life-saver until renewable energy finally takes over.