Modelling the future: climate change research in Russia during the late Cold War and beyond, 1970s–2000

Abstract

Climate models are what governments, experts and societies base their decisions on future climate action on. To show how different models were used to explain climatic changes and to project future climates before the emergence of a global consensus on the validity of general circulation models, this article focuses on the attempt of Soviet climatologists and their government to push for their climate model to be acknowledged by the international climate science community. It argues that Soviet climate sciences as well as their interpretations of the climate of the twenty-first century were products of the Cold War, and that the systematic lack of access to high-speed computers forced Soviet climatologists to use simpler climate reconstructions as analogues, with far-reaching consequences for climate sciences in post-Soviet Russia. By juxtaposing the history of Soviet climate modelling with the early history of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, which rejected the Soviet model, the article sheds light on the relationship of science and politics. The findings are based on archival and print material as well as on interviews.

Introduction from the editors

“…Katja Doose ( 2022 ) looks at the history of climate models in the Soviet Union. Whilst during the Cold War scientists in the West increasingly used general circulation models to make climate projections, their colleagues in the Soviet Union were less well equipped and had to come up with alternative solutions.…”

“…In the 1970s, Soviet scientists produced about half of all academic publications on climate change worldwide. Between 1972 and 1994, they were involved in large and long-term intergovernmental scientific collaborations with climatologists from the USA and other Western countries, contributing largely to today’s understanding of paleoclimatology and cloud formation (Doose 2022 ). Though this scientific community is still involved internationally (e.g.…”

From continuity to change: Soviet and Russian government attitudes on climate change (1989–2009)

“…This was again perceived as being part of a Western agenda and a push for domination, the important role of Soviet actors, including in the IPCC, notwithstanding (Beuerle 2020). 22 This uneasiness was also related to language and methodological issues -with English as a working language and modelling as a tool for researching climate change both clearly favouring (and related to) the predominance of Western actors in the field (Gordin 2015;Oldfield 2018;Dronin and Bychkova 2018;Doose 2022). Finally, internal documents also testify to growing Soviet difficulties in mustering the funds necessary for sending participants to international meetings and making monetary contributions to the international organizations involved.…”

“…While he at times upheld sceptical positions concerning trend, attribution and impact, he had written about ACC in the 1980s and, in the 2000s, admitted on various occasions that it might become a problem -also for Russia. Meanwhile, he advocated for geo-engineering solutions rather than binding GHG reductions(Oldfield 2018;Doose 2022;Mandrillon 2005;Medvedev 2010).…”

The Parallel Performance of SLNE Atmosphere-Ocean-Sea Ice Coupled Model

“…One of the first models of global atmospheric circulation was developed by Gury Marchuk, who used numerical modelling of atmospheric processes for numerical weather forecasting. From 1973 Marchuk created "mathematic calculations of atmospheric-ocean dynamics" [9] that was later tested on the supercomputer.…”