Climate Change Discourse in Russia

Past and Present

Marianna Poberezhskaya, Teresa Ashe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367511678
• eBook ISBN: 9781351028646
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book explores the development of climate change discourses in Russia. It contributes to the study of climate change as a cultural idea by developing the extensive Anglophone literature on environmental science, politics and policy pertaining to climate change in the West to consider how Russian discourses of climate change have developed. Drawing on contributors specialising in numerous periods, regions, disciplines and topics of study, the central thread of this book is the shared attempt to understand how environmental issues, particularly climate change, have been understood, investigated and conceptualised in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The chapters aim to complement work on the history of the discursive political construction of climate change in the West by examining a highly contrasting (but intimately related) cultural context. Russia remains one of the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters with one of the most carbon-intensive economies. As the world begins to suffer the extreme consequences of anthropogenic climate change, finding adequate solutions to global environmental problems necessitates the participation of all countries. Russia is a central actor in this global process and it, therefore, becomes increasingly important to understand climate change discourse in this region. Insights gained in this area may also be illuminating for examining environmental discourses in other resource rich regions of the world with alternative economic and political experiences to that of the West (e.g. China, Middle East).

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian environmental policy and politics, climate change discourses, environmental communication and environment and sustainability in general.

1 Introduction

The importance of the Soviet experience

Teresa Ashe

Introduction

Climate change has been a scientific issue for many decades and has, since the 1990s, dominated environmental politics at both domestic and international levels. Scholarship on the social history and cultural dimensions of ‘climate change’ as a concept has, over recent decades, made clear how and why our understanding of this phenomenon has developed the way it has. Such research allows for greater nuance and understanding of the many ways the topic is discussed and engaged with in different social spheres. However, the understanding that we have of climate change and its history is still, in the Anglophone literature, predominantly a story about American science and politics shaping global understandings of the phenomenon.

Despite the European origins of the theory of anthropogenic global warming, it was in America that the idea took scientific root. American research drove the development of climate science. American domestic politics shaped political understandings of the environmental problem. American negotiating strongly influenced the character of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its evolution. The central role of American scientists and political actors in shaping the way climate change is understood today cannot be denied. And yet, important as this role is, there are other cultures of climate change which exhibit similar discursive vitality in shaping shared global understandings of the issue.

This book advocates the position that one of the most important and under-studied cultures of climate change is that of Russia, both in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. As a key belligerent in the Second World War and a superpower of the Cold War, it is apparent that the technological and scientific pursuits of this nation, at the very least indirectly inspired and shaped the scientific organisation of the Western powers. Yet, more directly, Soviet scientists in the twentieth century were at the cutting edge of meteorological study and vastly influential in the global scientific community. The political actions of Soviet nations were fundamental in shaping scientific and environmental organisations like the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957/8 and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) created in the 1980s. Post-Soviet Russia also had an important role to play in the politics of climate change internationally. Without US ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, it was Russian participation that carried the Protocol over the threshold for effectiveness and allowed it to come into force. Russia currently holds a special place in international climate change negotiations, being not only a member of the BRICS block (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) of rapidly developing countries, but also one of the few nations in the world that has claimed with any plausibility that it might benefit from a warmer climate, at least in the short-term. It is also one of the nations about which the Anglophone literature has the least to say.

This book seeks to remedy this relative silence by drawing together contributions from a number of scholars researching in this area. Their approaches are by no means homogeneous and their areas of interest vary widely, but what unites them is their interest in Soviet and post-Soviet scientific, political and policy discourses of climate change and the environment. In this sense, the book is broadly rooted in the Discourse Analytical tradition of Michel Foucault, which traces the origins and power structures underpinning the social construction of a topic, deepening understanding of how a subject changes over time and of how those changes structure attendant social and political possibilities.

To contextualise and introduce the chapters in this volume, this introduction first outlines a short history of the scientific and political conceptualisation of climate change in the West, making clear how the centrality of the American experience requires a complementary appreciation of the Soviet experience. A brief literature review of the Anglophone literature on Soviet and post-Soviet climate change discourse will be presented in order to show that this is an under-studied area, but one in which important scholarship is currently being conducted. It will then outline the collection of chapters in this book and how severally and collectively they contribute to mitigating the deficiencies of the Anglophone literature on this topic.

A short history of climate change

Climate change as a scientific idea is usually dated back to a paper by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, in which he postulated that, because humans were adding quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels (something on which his colleague Arvid Högbom was working), this would contribute a warming influence that could change the climate of the planet (Arrhenius, 1896). Arrhenius’ rough calculation was that a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere would lead to a 2-degree warming of Global Mean Temperature (GMT). However, he was in no way suggesting that this should be regarded as problematic. In fact, the debate to which this paper was a contribution assessed the possibility, not of a warming planet, but of future ice ages.

The idea of climatic change had been difficult to countenance at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when ‘climate’ was essentially defined as an averaging of recorded weather patterns over a given period of time. However, in 1837, Louis Aggasiz proposed that many European landscapes could be better explained by the idea of historic ice ages than by the commonly held diluvial theories of nineteenth-century geology, which owed much of their explanatory power to biblical authority. With this idea of historic ice ages came the threat of potential future ice ages, and the scientific community began to propose theories that might explain how global temperature could change on such a dramatic level.

Conceptualisations of how the planet worked were simplistic enough at this time that it was presumed there would be one or two factors that might account for changes to the climate, and, of the many theories proposed, some suggested that a return to ice age climates might be likely. There was concern that if climates could change, then there was reason to fear a future ice age. Hence, by the time Arrhenius made his famous contribution to the debate, the idea that changes in atmospheric gases might account for planetary temperature changes was a fairly comforting notion: if human activities were to have such an effect, it would be a counterweight to any factors tending towards a potential ice age.

By the 1930s, there were scholars arguing that anthropogenic global warming was already discernible and should be taken seriously as a scientific phenomenon (Callendar, 1937). However, the majority of scientists at this time thought, that adding more CO₂ to the atmosphere would be unlikely to have any additional affect. Studies suggested that under normal conditions the spectrum at which CO₂ is able to block additional infrared radiation would already be saturated. Additionally, were this to prove untrue, there was in any case little reason for concern about anthropogenic warming, because if climate change of this kind were to happen, it was thought, it would be a positive thing, protecting humanity from the threat of ice ages.

The scientific and social shifts that allowed climate change, as a scientific theory, to garner more interest, came about in the context of the Second World War. It was during the Second World War that routine data collection and research at altitude made the scientific community aware that additional atmospheric CO₂was capable of blocking additional infrared radiation in the upper atmosphere and therefore that anthropogenic increases in CO₂ could be having an effect on the climate (Plass, 1956). It was also Second World War technological developments (the computer and the nuclear bomb, particularly) that facilitated post-war research into planetary systems, leading to the institutionalisation of climate change as a viable scientific topic of study. Second World War technological advancements and Cold War motivations made understanding the atmospheric system an important goal for post-war America, and it was here that climate change research in both oceanography and meteorology took root.

Oceanography was important to the study of climate change because, after it was accepted that the effect of CO₂ at altitude could affect the heat balance of the Earth, the next best reason for scientists to dismiss the idea was that the oceans would probably absorb any extra CO₂ humanity might emit. This was a plausible assumption until a paper by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, which studied the way ocean chemistry responded to nuclear fallout, was published in 1957. This paper queried the assumption that the oceans would prevent any anthropogenic warming effect by absorbing excess CO₂ and offered calculations of ocean chemistry that suggested that initial absorption might actually be followed by a relatively immediate re-release of significant quantities of CO₂. The idea that humanity might be affecting the planet in this way provoked surprise and curiosity within the oceanographic community, but it did not cause marked alarm or facilitate a narrative that would be appealing to funders of science. Revelle advocated for a study of baseline CO₂ in the atmosphere, which, through the institutional funds of the International Geophysical Year in 1957/8, allowed Charles Keeling to begin the research project that has since given us the famous Keeling Curve (Weart, 2008). This curve shows baseline CO₂ in the atmosphere rising over time in a seasonal ‘saw-tooth’ pattern that confirms the idea that oceans are not absorbing excess CO₂. Thus, an important, but modest, programme of research was established in oceanography that was able to furnish supportive empirical data on CO₂ and confirm that scientific understandings of atmospheric CO₂ needed re-evaluation. However, there was still a prevailing sense in the 1950s and 60s that any global warming effect from CO₂ increases would be a welcome counterbalance to potential global cooling.

In meteorology, parallel scientific developments in the 1950s and 60s furnished another re-evaluation of the idea that human activity might affect the climate, but the context was quite different. Rather than provoking curiosity, the idea was instead inspiring. Rather than the securing of a modest empirical research programme, the notion of climatic change formed part of the inspiration for an ambitious, theoretical research programme that would take advantage of cutting edge technologies to address some of the key social issues of the period. John von Neumann, who had been involved in the development of both the computer and the nuclear bomb, attempted to harness the power of the former in the service of numerical weather prediction (NWP), which meant taking readings of meteorological variables and, by solving equations based on this initial state, project what future meteorological states these variables would pass through over time. In essence, NWP was an attempt to forecast the weather, not from macro-level data such as mapping an incoming warm or cold front, but from a set of equations that would tell the researcher how weather would progress, given only an initial set of variables. This had been attempted by meteorologists before but had always previously failed due to lack of computational power. Now, with the computer to run calculations, the first successful hindcast (of weather events that had already happened and so could be checked) was achieved in 1950.

One may ask why, given that this research had little to do with atmospheric CO₂ or potential changes to climate, it should loom large in the history of climate science. One might also ask in what ways it could be said to be ‘inspired’ by climate change. The answers to these questions lie in the specifically Cold War context of the research project and the funding environment of the time. Interest in reliable NWP was desirable not solely for the obvious civilian and military benefits of knowing what meteorological conditions to anticipate at a given date in the future, but also because, if successful, it represented a first step along a pathway to understanding the weather well enough that it could be controlled and manipulated. Anthropogenic global warming was not a central focus or concern of this research programme, yet the possibility of climate change here represented, not a worrying environmental threat, but an inspiring hope of climate system knowledge with military applications. The idea of anthropogenic global warming incentivised pursuit of weather studies: if it could be understood whether human society was inadvertently changing the weather through the emission of CO₂, then it could better be understood how to deliberately change the weather to favour the American and disadvantage the Soviet, economic blocks.

By the 1960s, the modelling undertaken to understand weather events had developed to allow for the creation of a General Circulation Model (GCM) of the atmosphere. The first of these was attributed to Norman Phillips in 1955 and, though it modelled only a single column of atmosphere, it was followed by models that undertook to represent the entire globe (Weart, 2003: 59). These models did not just try to predict weather from a given set of data, but aimed to create climate models that mimicked the observed weather patterns of an earth typed planet. These facilitated far greater understanding of the planetary system and allowed for the prediction of likely weather patterns over far greater time scales than the weather models had permitted. In 1975, Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald tested Arrhenius’s old hypothesis that a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere would lead to a 2-degree warming of the planet. Their interest was in the heat balance of the earth and not directly in the risks of CO₂ emission, but their findings confirmed Arrhenius’s basic theory and made CO₂ warming a viable research topic in climatology (Manabe and Wetherald, 1975).

Thus, the idea of anthropogenic climate change was, by the mid-1970s, empirically plausible, with evidence that baseline atmospheric CO₂ was rising, and theoretically plausible, as GCMs confirmed what had previously been ‘back of the envelope’ calculations of the effects of doubling CO₂. In both oceanography and meteorology insights generated by the investigation of other topics had made the notion of anthropogenic global warming viable. The Cold War context here was vital. After the Second World War geo-scientific knowledge was amply appreciated by belligerent states and mounting Cold War tensions did little to devalue this type of knowledge. Both Roger Revelle and John von Neumann were working on projects related to Second World War technologies and Cold War problematics when they made their contributions to climate change science. Revelle was studying the role of oceanic chemistry with a view to better appreciating nuclear fallout (so that Soviet testing could be better apprehended), and von Neumann was using the computer in a project with consciously recognised military applications (predicting the conditions in which troops would be fighting and ultimately perhaps controlling those conditions).

On the other hand, cross-border international cooperation in the cause of science was often viewed as a palliative to such Cold War tensions and thus scientific activity was encouraged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1957/8 represented this pacific discourse, encouraging nations to work together in the pursuit of geophysical knowledge. Yet the IGY also provided opportunities for the superpowers to assess the extent of each other’s expertise and technology, not to mention the potential to demonstrate the relative superiority of the First- or Second-World approach to science. As such, scientific prowess was viewed as emphasising the superiority of the way of life to which each superpower was ideologically committed.

The military context of the Cold War shaped the topics that were of interest to American scientists, the tools with which they tackled these topics, the attitude their governments took to scientific activity and also the funding regimes that made such research possible. The Cold War American funding context in which the two research programmes took route was highly contoured by the government’s hope for viable military knowledge and national prestige. While von Neumann and his NWP research community firmly situated their work on weather prediction and manipulation as a potential step towards Cold War weather weaponry, the oceanographic research community was much less inclined to invite the oversight of the military funding bodies and preferred to emphasise that their work was ‘basic science’.

The way climate research was framed by meteorologists, therefore, was explicit that anthropogenic changes to weather might be possible, but this was not at all presented as a cause for concern. The idea that human beings could modify planetary we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Note on transliteration
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: the importance of the Soviet experience
• 2 Natural and anthropogenic climate change understanding in the Soviet Union, 1960s–1980s
• 3 Environmental change and the Soviet media before 1986: dissident and officially sanctioned voices
• 4 The environment of an energy giant: climate discourse framed by ‘hydrocarbon culture’
• 5 Traditional media and climate change in Russia: a case study of Izvestiia
• 6 Climate change in Russia’s Far East: controversial perspectives (mid 1990s–2010s)
• 7 Russian industry discourses on climate change
• Index