RSOE EDIS - Climate Change Monitoring - Heatwave event in Russia ...

Russia's record heat wave may already have taken 15,000 lives and cost the economy $15 billion, or 1 percent of gross domestic product, as fires and drought ravage the country. At least 7,000 people have probably died in Moscow as a result of the heat, and the nationwide death toll is likely to be at least twice that figure, according to Jeff Masters, co- founder of Weather Underground, a 15-year-old Internet weather service that gathers information from around the world. Russia's worst heat wave on record may slice 1 percent off of Russia's $1.5 trillion economy this year because of lower agricultural output and reduced activity in other areas such as industry, Alexander Morozov, chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc in Moscow, said in an e-mail today. While the official death toll from fires in central Russia is 52, the heat and smoke in Moscow have almost doubled the city's normal death rate to about 700 a day, Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city's public health department, said yesterday in a televised news conference. "I expect that by the time the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 is over, it may rival the 2003 European heat wave as the deadliest heat wave in world history," Masters wrote on his Ann Arbor, Michigan-based website.