While it may take months for the government to tally the damage caused, several economists said the disaster might cost Russia between 0.5 percent and 1.0 percent of this year’s gross domestic product (GDP), or roughly 7-15 billion dollars.

Alexander Morozov, chief economist for HSBC bank in Russia, said the abnormal heatwave, including a severe drought, forest fires and smog, will be a significant factor eroding growth as Russia recovers from the economic crisis.

“Economic growth in Russia is slowing and the heatwave will lead to a further slowdown,” Morozov told AFP, estimating the immediate losses from the fires and the smog at 1.0 percent of this year’s GDP, or around 15 billion dollars.

That number covers immediate losses in the agriculture, industrial and services sectors and does not take into account any indirect losses that would stem from a spike in deaths and illnesses, he said.

The International Monetary Fund said this month that a recovery in Russia from deep recession remained fragile but appeared to be gaining momentum, putting this year’s growth at 4.25 percent and 2011 at 4.0 percent.

The Russian economy contracted a very sharp 7.9 percent last year as key energy exports were hit by the global economic slump, sending the country into a painful reverse after years of buoyant expansion.

Several leading Russian industrial firms have shut down production during the heatwave to spare their workers the high temperatures, sending them on vacation.

Many Russians lay the blame for the disaster on the government but the authorities have rejected criticism that they were poorly prepared.

“You know full well that the weather is absolutely abnormal and people, authorities cannot entirely control this even if they display the highest level of thoroughness,” President Dmitry Medvedev said this week.

Moscow authorities acknowledged for the first time on Monday that due to the heatwave the city’s daily mortality rate had doubled and morgues were overflowing with bodies.

The federal government has yet to confirm that statistic.

Worst hit has been agriculture.

“The drought will likely cause a 30-33 percent drop in the grain harvest — mostly wheat — this year. Other agricultural goods get adversely affected too,” Morozov said.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Monday slashed forecast for the wheat harvest by a third to 60-65 million tonnes after shocking international markets last week by announcing that from August 15, grain exports would be banned so as to keep prices down at home.

Vladimir Tikhomirov, chief economist at Uralsib, also estimates that if the heatwave does not subside by late August, the economic losses may be between 0.5 percent and 1.0 percent of this year’s GDP.

“But that’s the worst case scenario,” he told AFP, saying economic activity would still pick up later in the year.

The noxious smoke has forced Russians to flee the capital en masse and aviation officials said more than 100,000 people left Moscow by air on Sunday alone — a record number for the current year.

Economists said it was too early to estimate the long-term losses but admitted they could be big. The drought is likely to boost inflation further by squeezing the supply of agricultural products, they said.

“Indirect losses may be significantly larger,” Dmitry Polevoi, a Moscow-based economist with ING Bank, told AFP.

“We have raised our year-end inflation forecasts for 2010 and 2011 to 8.5 percent and 9.5-10 percent … from 6.8 percent and 7.6 percent before,” he wrote in a note to clients.

The Russian anti-monopoly service meanwhile said it was looking into reports of sharp rises in the prices of ventilators and air-conditioning equipment as people try to keep cook in the heatwave.

- This has been the largest polar science conference ever – a powerful demonstration of knowledge. We have been pleased and honoured to host you, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said in his closing speech:

- Think about it: For centuries the Polar Regions ranked among the areas of the world about which countries used to know the least. A hundred years ago, large parts of the Arctic and Antarctica had not even been explored by people from outside these regions. And those who ventured deep into the Polar Regions rated as adventurous and daring explorers.

Many countries have proud lists of such explorers, and Norway is among them. Explorers and scientists such as Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen not only mapped unchartered regions. They also played a major part in the shaping of Norway’s modern national identity.

Next year – on 14 December – we will commemorate that 100 years have passed since Roald Amundsen  was the first to set foot on the South Pole. Others have almost been forgotten, like another Norwegian, Carsten Borchgrevink who, 12 years earlier, led the first expedition to spend the winter on the Antarctic continent, and paved the way for his more famous countryman.

The huts his expedition erected at Cape Adare were in fact the first buildings on the continent. They were made of prefabricated pine units made here in this very municipality of Skedsmo by Strømmen Trevarefabrikk about three kilometres west of this venue. The huts are still standing and are a proud part of Antarctica’s heritage.

For Norway, our history of polar exploration is just one reason for our deep involvement in polar research. We are the world’s fifth polar research nation in terms of publications. Norway is the only country with territories and maritime areas in both polar areas – large areas – and we have important industries that are dependent on them.

The intention of this conference has been to sum up the scientific results from the fourth international polar year that ended 1st of March last year.

The results are impressing: Altogether, 2 600 abstracts of scientific papers were submitted to the conference. Some 2 200 presentations have been given during the week. There have been a number of information and outreach activities. Enough to state that work will go on for a long time beyond the conference.

We can now state that the International Polar Year (IPY) has lifted polar research to a new level. Fifty thousand researchers and technicians from more than 60 nations have demonstrated the value of international cooperation.

Sound scientific knowledge is paramount for good management, making you – the polar researchers – key drivers in dealing with the challenges in the Polar Regions and their global impacts.

- This conference is the first of the IPY follow-up conferences. I am grateful to Canada for agreeing to host the next conference in 2012 and wish you all the best in your preparations, the Norwegian Foreign Minister concluded.

In February, Brown, the then British prime minister, was named by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to co-chair the group of 19 leading experts with Ethiopian Premier Meles Zenawi. Stoltenberg, head of Norway’s Labour Party, has been among members of the panel.

After Brown lost last month’s election, the UN Secretary General has now appointed Stoltenberg as new co-chaair of the group, which is seeking ways of raising $100 billion a year from 2020 to help developing nations tackle global warming.

Asked by public broadcaster NRK, why he thought he had been appointed, Prime Minister Stoltenberg said: “Norway and I have worked on these questions for many years. I will spend considerable time on this, and I hope we may contribute towards reaching consencus and solutions.”

The purpose of the conference is to establish an interim partnership arrangement for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+). This partnership would aim to ensure rapid implementation of a global coordinated effort to preserve the world’s tropical forests, in line with UNFCCC decisions.

The climate and forest meeting hosted by President Sarkozy in Paris on 11 March 2010 provided valuable input for the early establishment of a partnership.

Deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries accounts for around 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Measures to reduce these emissions (known as REDD+) are the quickest and least expensive way of achieving large emission cuts. In the UN climate change negotiations, substantial progress has been made on setting up a REDD+ mechanism.

The focus of the interim REDD+ partnership should be on rapid implementation. Negotiations on outstanding issues should be left for the UNFCCC process. Once a UNFCCC REDD+ mechanism has been set up, it will replace or subsume the interim partnership.

The legitimacy of the process will be critical for its success, the conference Home Page states.

A transparent and inclusive multilateral process is therefore being established, facilitated by meetings at the political level in Paris and Oslo, to help produce a REDD+ partnership.

Thousands of travellers will face severe delays after a six hour no-fly zone was imposed across the Republic and Northern Ireland.

Airspace over the Outer Hebrides was also closed to operations on Monday night, while airlines warned passengers to avoid travelling to airports without checking departure information online.

The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) and UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) are monitoring the situation.

Eamon Brennan, IAA chief executive, said that, based on the new regime imposed in Europe last week, officials had no choice but to impose a no-fly zone from 7am to 1pm.

“The decision is based on the safety risks to crews and passengers as a result of the drift south of the volcanic ash cloud caused by the north easterly winds,” he said.

The situation will be reviewed again at 9am.

Almost 440 flights had been due to depart and fly in to Dublin Airport throughout today, with more scheduled from Shannon, Galway, Sligo, Knock, Donegal, Cork and Kerry.

Ryanair cancelled all its flights to and from the Republic of Ireland, Belfast and Derry City from 6am to 2pm, with Aer Lingus suspending all Irish services to the UK and Europe until 1pm.

However all but one of its transatlantic services to the US will operate, subject to delays.

Aer Arann has been forced to cancel services to and from Derry and Donegal airports while easyJet warned of possible disruptions on services to Northern Ireland and Scotland.

The closure of Outer Hebrides airspace has hit operations from Stornoway, Tyree, Barra and Benbecula.

The CAA confirmed there would be a no-fly zone over Northern Ireland from 7am, meaning Belfast International, Belfast City and City of Derry airports would be closed.
Irish Ferries said it had space on its services between Ireland and the UK and Ireland and France.

Flights from continental Europe will not be impacted by the plume of ash from Iceland’s volcano Eyjafjallajokull, which caused travel chaos for almost a week last month.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn has a front row seat to the otherworldly tempest and is recording the most detailed data yet of storms on the ringed planet. But amateur astronomers back on Earth have also managed to chip in on the Saturn blizzard stormwatch.

“We were so excited to get a heads-up from the amateurs,” said Cassini scientist Gordon Bjoraker, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The data showed a large, turbulent storm, dredging up a lot of material from the deep atmosphere and covering an area at least five times larger than the biggest blizzard that hit Earth so far this year — the “Snowmageddon” storm that blanketed the Washington, D.C. area in snow in February. [Saturn's rings and moons.]

Saturn’s ‘storm alley’

Cassini’s radio and plasma wave instrument and imaging cameras have been tracking thunder and lightning storms on Saturn for years in a region around Saturn’s mid-latitudes that is nicknamed “storm alley.”

But, gathering data on storms requires a tricky balancing act, since storms on Saturn can come and go on a time scale of weeks, while Cassini’s imaging and spectrometer observations have to be locked in place months in advance.

Given these limitations, NASA sometimes enlists the help of amateur astronomers.

The radio and plasma wave instrument regularly picks up electrostatic discharges that are associated with the storms, so scientists have been sending periodic tips to amateurs, who can quickly go to their backyard telescopes and try to spy the bright convective storm clouds.

Amateur astronomers Anthony Wesley, Trevor Barry and Christopher Go received one of those notices in February, and were able to snap dozens of pictures over the next several weeks.

In fact, in late March, Wesley — who is based in Australia and was the first person spot the aftermath of an comet impact on Jupiter last summer — sent Cassini scientists an e-mail with a picture of the storm attached.

“I wanted to be sure that images like these were being seen by the Cassini team just in case this was something of interest to be imaged directly by Cassini or the Hubble Space Telescope,” Wesley wrote.

Cassini scientists analyzed all the images in detail, including a picture from March 13 of the storm at its peak, taken by Go, who lives in the Philippines.

Saturn’s storm season

Luckily, the composite infrared spectrometer happened to be targeting the latitude of the storms. The Cassini scientists had known there might be storms in that area, but were unsure when they might be active.

The Cassini spectrometer obtained data on March 25 and 26 that showed larger than expected amounts of phosphine, a gas typically found in Saturn’s deep atmosphere, and an indicator that powerful currents were lifting material upward into the upper troposphere.

The spectrometer data also showed that the tropopause, which is the dividing line between the serene stratosphere and the lower churning troposphere, was about 1 degree Fahrenheit (minus 17.2 degrees Celsius) colder in the storm cell than in neighboring areas.

“A balloonist floating about 100 kilometers (62 miles) down from the bottom of Saturn’s calm stratosphere would experience an ammonia-ice blizzard with the intensity of Snowmageddon,” said Brigette Hesman, a composite infrared spectrometer team member and assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland.

“These blizzards appear to be powered by violent storms deeper down — perhaps another 100 to 200 kilometers (62 to 124 miles) down — where lightning has been observed and the clouds are made of water and ammonia,” Hesman said.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Putin visited the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land, 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, as part of Russia’s drive to reassert its presence in the resource-rich region, now opening up to commercial exploration because of melting ice.

Putin told state-run Rossiya 24 television in the Arctic he was shocked to see stocks of “abandoned barrels of fuel scattered all the way to the horizon.” It was not immediately clear when Putin made the trip.

“The decrease in military activity after the collapse of the USSR has left this dump which we see now. The pollution level is six times higher than normal. What we need to do now is to organise a sweeping cleanup of the Arctic,” he said.

He said fuel may leak into the Arctic Ocean from the rusty barrels as temperatures slowly rise.

An increase of up to 4 degrees Celsius has been felt across the Arctic in the past 30 years. While some scientists put it down to fluctuating weather patterns, environmentalist groups say it is caused by global warming due to human activity.

Putin mentioned the trip in a speech to parliament on April 20 but the Russian media only released the material Thursday. Foreign reporters did not accompany Putin on the trip.

The footage was aired just days after Russia and Norway agreed on the course of their Arctic border after a decades-old dispute, paving the way for oil and gas exploration.

“Geopolitically, Russia’s most vital national interests are linked to the Arctic,” said Putin, wearing a red polar jacket and cap bearing Russia’s national symbol — a two-headed eagle.

During the Cold War, the archipelago, home to a large population of polar bears, was Russia’s outpost in the Arctic and hosted an air defence base and military air strip.

Media-savvy Putin, 57, who has shot a tiger with a tranquiliser gun and released a pair of Persian leopards into the wild, was shown attaching a satellite-tracking tag onto the neck of a tranquilised male polar bear and shook its paw.

“The paw shake was strong,” a smiling Putin said. “It is clear he is the real Lord of the Arctic.”

The agreements were completed in conjunction with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s state visit to Norway.

- We have common challenges and interests in higher education and knowledge, especially in the northern areas regarding energy and environmental studies, marine sciences, and also in social studies and language, said Minister of  Research and Higher Education Tora Aasland.

There already exists a broad cooperation between Norwegian and Russian institutions. From the Norwegian side there are several measures to increase cooperation in higher education, including the Quota Scheme for students and special Northern Area grants. Russian students now constitute the second largest group of foreign students (after Germany) at Norwegian institutions.

The purpose of cooperation in meteorology is to improve weather forecasting for the Barents Sea and adjacent areas, which among other things is important to strengthen economic and trade cooperation in the north. The cooperation involves the exchange of research resources, experts and meteorological information.

-  Meteorological information for the northern areas is crucial for understanding the global climate trend. This agreement is also a contribution from the two countries to perhaps the greatest challenge in the years ahead, said Aasland.

The agreement on higher education was signed by the Norwegian Minister of Research and Higher Education Tora Aasland and State Secretary / Deputy Minister YP Sentyurin of Education and Science Ministry.  The agreement on meteorology was signed by the Russian Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology, YP Trutnev.

A team of Australian and Japanese scientists, in a study published in Sunday’s issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the current is a key part of a global ocean circulation pattern that helps control the planet’s climate.

Scientists had previously detected evidence of the current but had no data on it.

“We didn’t know if it was a significant part of the circulation or not and this shows clearly that it is,” one of the authors, Steve Rintoul, told Reuters.

Rintoul, of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, said it proved to be the fastest deep ocean current yet found, with an average speed of 20 cm (7.9 inches) a second. It was also found to carry more than 12 million cubic meters a second of very cold, salty water from Antarctica.

“At these depths, below three kilometers (two miles) from the surface, these are the strongest recorded speeds we’ve seen so far, which was really a surprise to us.”

He said the current carries dense, oxygen-rich water that sinks near Antarctica to the deep ocean basins further north around the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean and then branches out.

GLOBAL CONVEYOR BELT

The current forms part of a much larger network that spans the world’s oceans, acting like a giant conveyor belt to distribute heat around the globe.

Oceans are also a major store of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is emitted naturally and by mankind, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

For example, the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the North Atlantic, giving northern Europe a relatively mild climate. Failure of the current, which has occurred in the past, would plunge parts of Europe into a deep freeze, scientists say.

“The deep current along the Kerguelen Plateau is part of a global system of ocean currents called the overturning circulation, which determines how much heat and carbon the ocean can soak up,” Rintoul said.

A key part of the circulation is the creation of large volumes of the very cold, salty water in several areas along coastal Antarctica that then sinks to the bottom and flows to other ocean basins.

The team deployed measuring devices anchored to the sea floor at depths of up to 4.5 km (3 miles) and recorded current speed, temperature and salinity for a two-year period.

“The continuous measurements provided by the moorings allow us, for the first time, to determine how much water the deep current carries to the north,” Rintoul said.

He said a key issue for predicting climate was whether the overturning circulation was going to stay at its present strength or whether it was sensitive to changes as climate changes.

That meant further improving measurements of the speed and volume of the cold, salty water that is created around Antarctica.

Attendees say the summit will focus on the plight of the world’s poorest, which they argue went largely ignored at official United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Copenhagen last December.

The Copenhagen meeting was widely drubbed for failing to produce a new treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions and critics said the deal it produced will not avert a climate catastrophe.

The “People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights,” which runs through Thursday, will draft new proposals to be offered for consideration at the next UN climate talks in Mexico at the end of the year.

Bolivia’s UN ambassador Pablo Solon said the conference, which was expected to draw some 18,000 people, was “the only way to get the climate change talks back on track.”

Developing nations have resisted a legally binding climate treaty, arguing that wealthy nations must bear the primary responsibility for climate change.

Nearly 130 countries, including many of the world’s poorest, will be represented at the Cochabamba conference.

Anti-globalization activists Naomi Klein of Canada and Jose Bove of France are set to attend, and organizers have also invited James Cameron, director of the blockbuster film “Avatar,” and James Hansen, a US researcher who was among the first to warn about climate change.

Indigenous leaders, including Nilo Cayuqueo, an indigenous Mapuche from Argentina, were also in town, concerned about the impact of climate change on their homelands.

“We have great extremes of heat and cold, and as a result we’re seeing illnesses and outbreaks that once had disappeared,” said Cayuqueo.

This week’s gathering will also give a giant megaphone to a left-leaning bloc of Latin American leaders, including presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales, the indigenous president of host nation Bolivia.

The conference will seek to refine proposals presented by Morales in Copenhagen that included the creation of a world tribunal for climate issues and a global referendum on environmental choices.

The conference begins the day after representatives from the world’s leading economies gathered in Washington for a preparatory meeting ahead of the December UN summit in Cancun.

The US-led Major Economies Forum comprises 17 countries responsible for the bulk of global emissions and excludes smaller nations such as Sudan whose firebrand negotiators held up sessions at December’s Copenhagen summit.

Washington hopes the closed-door talks will allow key nations to quietly assess what they can achieve heading into the next major climate summit in December in Cancun.

“Clearly, there is still a gap between the views of the developing and developed world,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said. “We’re going to see if we can, through the course of this discussion, narrow that down.”