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.