Saratov, Heat 2010
This year’s summer will never be forgotten. Saratov is not Moscow, and we are accustomed to hot summers.+30°C (86°F) during the summer time is quite normal here, and even higher temperatures are not unknown. The years like 1972, 1996 or 1998 were not quite like 2010, but also extremely hot. I was 6 months old in 1972, so all I know about it is what my mother told me, but I remember the other two quite well. And yet, when for three months in a row daytime temperatures never go below +27°C (81°F), and for a month and a half of that — below +34°C (93°F), and rains seem to avoid your place at all costs, it feels kinda over the top.
In the second half of July the forecasts at gismeteo.ru looked positively scary: the number denoting the daytime temperature usually exceeded forty degrees (that’s in three digits Fahrenheit). And this happened in the country where «forty degrees» usually describes the favourite alcoholic drink rather than any outside temperatures. Those forecasts were exaggerated, but just a little.
In other words, Moscow temperature records caused just ironic smiles here. Some of my compatriots are already wearing t-shirts that say «I survived the heat of 2010». And I miss the summer.
In 1998 I taught myself to enjoy heat rather than «survive» it. Of course, +40°C is a bit over the top even for me, but +35°C is just the right temperature for me to recharge my inner batteries, the same way as my mobile phone does when connected to a power supply. After all, we have 8 or 9 months of cold weather ahead.
So I won’t buy that t-shirt. After all, many have survived the heat, so it’s hardly heroism. I’m not going to pay for the installation of air conditioning either: there are higher priorities. But my wardrobe has been renewed considerably this summer — mainly through adding all those open tops and straw hats. Thankfully, the «dress code» in our office puts little strain on us, if any.
To sum it up, surviving the heat as such wasn’t a very hard task, but its side effects are a different story. Dead crops, forest fires… well, the latter mainly spared our province, except at the beginning of September, when we lost homes for the first time. And even then we didn’t lose any lives, unlike our neighbours.
Buckwheat shortages have been no fun either, but that’s apparently over too.
Some climatologists tell us that we haven’t seen anything yet, but I hope they are mistaken. At least now out foreign friends know that Russia is not always a cold country — media all over the world dedicated a lot of articles to our «unprecedented» heat wave. And the global warming believers are happy now: their theory has just received a huge proof.
Last modified: 21.09.2010