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.
Highlights
This article belongs to the topical collection “Climate Change in Russia — history, science and politics in global perspectives
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
The paleo-analogue model that was somewhat endured for the US-USSR cooperation on climate change was fully rejected by the emerging global climate science community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Summary
Climatic Change (2022) 171: 6 with international climate science, and they somewhat disappeared from the global climate science scene, as witnessed by the rejection of their methodology in the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 1990. Soviet scientists developed an alternative climate model based on paleoclimate reconstruction which, in contrast to western projections based on the general circulation model (GCM), gave an overall optimistic forecast of the future climate of the Soviet Union. While this interpretation by the scientists was most likely not politically motivated, it still helped Soviet politicians to use this interpretation in order to minimise the problem of climate change and to further develop the economy based on natural resource depletion. Based on archival material from the Russian State Archive of Economy, the IPCC archive and published material and interviews with climatologists, this article contributes to an understanding of how social, economic and political factors shaped the development of climate science during the Cold War and beyond
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