Changing Climate, Changing World

Ottawa, Canada's capital, is often described as the coldest, snowiest capital in the world. After Ulan Bator in Mongolia, that is. Coyly mentioned with a hearty chuckle.

Well, Ottawa, Canada's capital does receive snow aplenty and the residents of that capital city groan under the weight of the snow that requires constant shovelling as they go about their business of living within the kindly confines of an economically and technologically advanced democracy in a country blessed with a plethora of natural resources and geographical anomalies.

And then there is the winter of 2010, which belies that title of 'most snowy', 'coldest' that Ottawans both abhor and take rough pride in. Whatever happened to all the snow Ottawa normally receives? And the cold; it did make a brief appearance then got lost somewhere, along with the snow. Oh yes, we know where the cold and the snow went; to places that normally do not see that level of both; say Washington D.C. and Boston, Mass.

While Ottawa hasn't had to do much shovelling, those great American cities which do not have municipal equipment to cope with all that snow, have been somehow ... coping. And the real snowiest, coldest capital in the world, how is it managing this winter? Not that Mongolia is Canada, mind; it is not. It is a struggling country hoping to advance into the 20th Century with an emerging economy and hopes for the future.

But for now it is suffering a dreadful dilemma. Caused by, what else? too much snow, and too much frigid weather. Genghis Khan's nomadic warriors who conquered China, Tibet and most of Central Asia are now humble herdsmen whose nomadic lifestyle has been hard hit of late. Ten years ago miserably unkind weather conditions caused snow-stranded nomads to die along with millions of heads of livestock.

Today similar weather conditions are plaguing the country with its record-breaking cold winter. They would be hard put to believe in a man-made phenomenon called Global Warming. The capital city of Ulan Bator has seen animmense increase in its residents, as tent cities have sprung up of late, with desperate herders moving there, their livestock having perished.

But Mongolia is a country rich in natural resources, not very much of which has been tapped nor extraction processes developed. It has huge untapped reserves of coal, copper, gold and uranium. It is currently a country with no disposable wealth, extremely aware of the unrelieved needs of its people.

"It is a very bad crisis. the cold we are experiencing now is a record low for the last 37 years and 90% of the country is covered in snow", according to Mongolia's Prime Minister Sukhbaatariin Batbold. Mongolia's difficulties arose latterly; with the collapse of the USSR, facing new Russian export restrictions making herders' livelihoods more difficult than ever without the Soviet-organized collectives and stable prices.

Even without the extreme cold conditions where this year so far two million head of livestock have died from exposure, the country's infertile land is not capable of adequately feeding them. A summer drought had struck fodder supplies and large numbers of animals are starving. "Only about 20% of the herders are successful ... More than 50% of their herds have been lost."

The government, facing a huge fiscal debt, along with their dire humanitarian problem of desperately needful urban refugees, will have to turn to exploiting their natural resource wealth. "You have to have revenues coming from somewhere and that is going to come from mining" according to country manager Arshad Sayed, with the World Bank.

But foreign mining firms, accustomed to moving right in and taking over, and permitting developing countries to retain a relatively minuscule share of the mining profits are holding back from investments in Mongolia. Because the Mongolian government shrewdly insists on majority local ownership for large projects, augmented by a tax on mining profits.

This is now. Experts in capital investment properties predict Mongolia will soon see its economy growing, gradually overtaking countries like Angola and Azerbaijan as quickly-growing economies. That would be a nice rescue for a country whose capital is the coldest, snowiest in the world.