Sunbathing in Siberia: How Did The Russian Arctic Get Hotter Than Seattle??

Can we have a beach vacation in Verkhoyansk this year?

SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2020: What the actual fricassee, folks! While much of the world is celebrating Pride Week (hopefully with proper protective gear), I'm sitting here pondering how the hell the community of Verkhoyansk, Siberia, well above the Arctic Circle, scored its first-ever 100-degree day a week ago Saturday, when this little community of around 1,400 residents is most commonly known as "the coldest village on earth." A year ago, I was blogging about wildfires and floods in Siberia, waterlogged cemeteries and the like; and worrying about whether Seattle would get smogged up with Russian-Arctic wildfire smoke, on top of the usual dust and ashes from British Columbia, eastern Washington and California. But this is the first I've heard of Siberia getting this sort of heatwave, apparently caused by a very hot high-pressure air current that's just sitting up there, happily melting permafrost along with what's left of Arctic glaciers.

UPDATE (MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2020): Okay, folks, back to the blog. I've been way too obsessed with a certain libel case happening at the High Court in London. Meanwhile, out here in Seattle, where the summer temperatures tend to feel hotter than they actually are, we haven't yet been choked by wildfire smoke; but there's no doubt that wildfires are occurring this time of year. I will have to look up where they are now. Elsewhere, a hurricane named Isias has been ravaging the east coast, and the worldwide COVID-19 totals (tallied since December) have just passed 20 million. And I've just been reading an article about an ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic that recently calved off a portion of itself larger than the area of Manhattan--around 80 square kilometers.

Also, in exactly two weeks, I plan to travel to my Mom's home in Crossville, TN, where I've been going to spend my birthday for the past few years. I also want to visit my Mom's cats; as they are both 13, I figure they won't be around forever, though they remain in good health overall. I will spend an entire day wearing a mask, and possibly rubber gloves as well, on two flights, and three different airports, hoping that I can stay far enough away from most people that my risk of Covid exposure is not too high. It's the first time since January that I've traveled a significant distance outside Seattle. Tennessee has fewer cases than Washington, I think; but the Knoxville newspaper no longer publishes total cases by county every day, possibly for political reasons--the governors and state legislators in some states want everything reopened ASAP, and are expecting people to (more or less) forget that the novel Coronavirus is still out there, and still spreading rapidly. In fact, our federal government has basically abandoned even the pretense of controlling the pandemic, essentially leaving states on their own; and more-conservative state governments want everything reopened now, taking the view that, "If you get it, you get it. Tough it out. If you're that much of a wimp and scared of a little 'flu bug', stay home. The rest of us red-blooded Americans are going to forget the freaking virus and get back to work." Nice. Of course, let's not hear any complaining from folks like the tens of thousands of bikers that just descended on Sturgis when a whole bunch of them get sick as dogs and end up fired for not coming to work sick. Not that I want to see bikers, or anyone else, catch COVID-19. Sigh...and please, whatever you do, don't ingest or inject any brand of disinfectant.