Dr. Tim Ball has worked with a number of Russian climate scientists and presents an excellent look into the two ways of doing science.
From Watts Up With That:
Vladimir Putin; Climate and Political Realist?
Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
The Daily Caller headline said, Russia’s Putin Says Global Warming Is ‘A Fraud.” What Putin is doing and saying is nothing new. He always knew that the IPCC climate was wrong he simply changed his political position as the situation dictated. Soviet and latterly Russian climatologists are far better than most in the west. I know Chinese climatologists are their equals because I worked with both.
Experience
I worked with several Soviet climatologists during the Cold War. It began when I wrote a chapter in a book titled Climate Since AD 1500. The editor had chapter authors review other chapters. One that I was assigned titled “Documentary evidence from the USSR” by E. P. Borisenkov reported on the value of the Russian Chronicles. I became very familiar with the work of Mikhail Budyko, who essentially changed the approach from synoptic climatology to energy budget climatology. His work was influential to current climate science.
And the money quote:
During the Cold War, most Soviet science publications were not available until a significant change occurred when Jewish scientists who escaped from the Soviet Union set up translation services in Israel. In approximately 1990 a divergence in climate science emerged between Eastern block countries and the West. The Soviets believed climate was cyclical, the sum of a multitude of cycles. The challenge was to identify them and how they interacted. Cyclical climate events pervaded Russian thinking particularly since the publication of Nikolai Kondratieff’s 1926 article titled “Long Waves in Economic Life.” The concept of climate cycles has flourished in economics and stock market prognostications ever since. Michael Zahorchak’s book “Climate: The Key to Understanding Business Cycles” is a good example. The western view revolved around Chaos Theory that weather was unpredictable beyond a couple of days because of randomness; Lorenz and the butterfly. This created an ongoing contradiction for AGW proponents. If you can’t forecast accurately for a few days, how can you be so certain about 50 and 100-year forecasts?
The fascinating thing about the east-west scientific, intellectual and philosophical difference is that it was interpreted as political and ideological. It wasn’t, and Putin’s position is a manifestation of the difference. What is fascinating is his recognition that the IPCC and Kyoto was a political agenda to suppress development, except that he believes it is only applied to developing countries. In fact, it was designed to promote equal and limited development by weakening developed nations and minimally improving developing nations. All this comes after the developed nations paid for their sins and the money went to the developing nations who suffered. It takes a communist to recognize an attempt at one-world government. Putin is not opposed to this as long as Russia is in control.
Much more at the site - Dr. Ball knows what he is talking about and is able to convey it very clearly.
There is now zero reason to beat the Anthropogenic Global Warming drum - it is dead. The wheels have come off the bus.
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