Kirill Jakowlewitsch Kondratjew

Kirill Jakowlewitsch Kondratyev ( Russian Кирилл Яковлевич Кондратьев , English transcription Kyrill or Kirill Yakovlevich Kondratyev ; born June 14, 1920 in Rybinsk ; † May 1, 2006 in Saint Petersburg ) was a Russian climate researcher.

biography

Kondratiev went to school in Leningrad and studied physics, mathematics and chemistry at the Leningrad State University from 1938 . From 1941 he went through the blockade of Leningrad as a soldier, was wounded three times and in 1944 discharged from military service. He continued his studies and received his diploma in atmospheric physics in 1946. To do this, he took part in an expedition to Rostov-on-Don to investigate the possibility of using smoke to protect the vines from frost (a major problem in agriculture at the time). That was the beginning of his occupation with the radiation budget of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect and climate models. From 1946 he was a lecturer and later professor at the Leningrad State University, where he headed the department of atmospheric physics, retired in 1978 and was also the rector of the university. From 1958 to 1981 he was head of the radiation research department at the Geophysical Observatory of the Leningrad Academy. From 1982 to 1992 he was also head of the remote sensing department at the Institute for Limnology. From 1992 he was a consultant at the Research Center for Ecological Safety of the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and was a co-founder of the Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NIERSC) in Saint Petersburg.

Among other things, he was a visiting scientist in Mexico, at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Tokyo and Athens for a long time. He has multiple honorary doctorates (Lille, Athens, Budapest) and received the State Prize of the USSR .

He was a member of the Leopoldina (1970) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ( 1972 ). In 1982 he became a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences .

Scientific work

He was a pioneer in the Soviet Union in modeling the radiation budget of the atmosphere (on which his first monograph appeared in 1950) and in remote sensing with satellites for environmental issues. In 1958 he published the first article on satellite exploration of the upper atmosphere in the Finnish journal Arkhimedes. Later he also dealt with the conditions in various planetary atmospheres (for which atmosphere for the radiation budget with various gases were undertaken). This also led to collaboration with leading scientists in the Soviet space program and he was involved in the development of the instruments for Soviet weather satellites. He also did many balloon experiments for measurements in the upper atmosphere. They also found abnormal absorption due to nitrogen dioxide from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. In the 1970s he undertook extensive experiments (CAENEX, GAAREX) to research the role of aerosols in the atmosphere (also in deserts and the Arctic) and investigated the physics of clouds. From the 1980s he dealt with global environmental and climate change and potential dangers for humanity.

Numerous monographs come from him.

Critics of the Kyoto Protocol and environmental concerns

He was also active in promoting international cooperation, for example within the framework of the WMO (development of the Global Atmospheric Research Program, GARP, as a forerunner of WRCP). Most recently he emerged as an influential critic of the Kyoto Protocol and the IPCC in Russia . He was a representative of a conception of the self-regulation of the planet similar to the Gaia hypothesis (after Gorshkov 1995). He did not consider human-made global warming to be proven and not to be the greatest threat to humanity or life on earth (others included overpopulation, land destruction and contamination, destruction of the biosphere and extinction of species, depletion of fossil energy reserves and Mineral reserves, water pollution, destruction of the ozone layer and others). The one-sided focus on global warming has pushed these other, in his view much greater dangers into the background. In particular, according to Kondratiev, the biosphere, as long as it is not destroyed by humans, would absorb a large part of the rise in carbon dioxide. He also questioned the reliability of the scientific basis of the IPCC reports and suspected them of bias, said that essential factors were being disregarded, criticized in the late 1990s that the climate simulation models used were far too imperfect, their data base was too small and he doubted the predictive power for abrupt changes and that they would not predict them. The reduction of greenhouse gases is desirable, but not a solution to the problem as long as urbanization and the destruction of the biosphere continue.

Books (selection)

• with OP Filipovich: The thermal state of upper atmospheric layers, Washington DC, NASA 1962
• Radiative heat exchange in the atmosphere, Pergamon Press 1965 (expanded version of the Russian edition from 1950)
• Radiation in the atmosphere, Academic Press 1969
• Satellite climatology, NASA 1972
• Published in: Atmospheric radiation studies, Israel Program for Scientific Translations 1974
• with AM Bunakova: The meteorology of Mars, NASA 1974
• Climate shocks: natural and anthropogenic, Wiley 1988
• with VG Gorshkov, KS Losev: The natural biological regulation of the environment, Springer 1994
• with A. Grigoryev: Ecological Disasters (Russian), Saint Petersburg 2001
• with AA Buznikov; OM Pokrovsky: Global change and remote sensing, Chichester: Wiley 1996
• with OM Johannessen, VV Melentyev: High latitude climate and remote sensing, Wiley 1996
• Multidimensional global change, Wiley 1998
• with Arthur P. Cracknell (ed.), Observing global climate change, CRC Press / Francis and Taylor 1998
• Climate effect of aerosols and clouds, Chichester: Praxis Publ. 1999
• Editor with NN Filatov: Limnology and remote sensing: a contemporary approach, Springer 1999
• with Costas Varotsos: Atmospheric ozone variability: implications for climate change, human health, and ecosystems, Springer 2000
• with Vladimir Krapivin, Costas Varotsos: Global carbon cycle and climate change, Springer 2003
• with Leonid P. Bobylev; Ola M. Johannessen: Arctic environment variability in the context of global change, Springer 2003
• with Vladimir Krapivin, Gary W. Phillips: Global environmental change: modeling and monitoring, Springer 2002
• Stability of life on earth: principal subject of scientific research in the 21st century, Springer 2004
• with Vladimir F. Krapivin, Costas A. Varotsos: Natural disasters as interactive components of global ecodynamics, Chichester: Praxis Publ. 2006
• with VK Dončenko: Ecodynamics and Geopolitics (Russian), Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg 1999

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography in Arthur Cracknell, Vladimir Kravipin, Costas Varetsos, Global Climatology and Ecodynamics: Anthropogenic Changes to Planet Earth, Springer / Praxis Publ. 2009
2. ↑ The study came to the conclusion that the positive effect of the smoke was not based on a greenhouse effect, but in the shielding of the sun in the early morning, when the plants were still damaged by frost. Soon after, he found that the warming in greenhouses was based less on the radiation effect named after it, but on the prevention of turbulent mixing of the radiated heat from the ground with the remaining atmosphere through the glass roof. This was also shown by Robert Williams Wood in the USA in 1934, who replaced glass with quartz glass ( glass house effect ).
3. ↑ Member entry of Kirill Y. Kondratyev at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on June 26, 2017.
4. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1950-1999. (PDF, 226 kB) at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org)
5. ↑ For example aerosols are spatially and temporally very variable and difficult to incorporate into models
6. ↑ for example Kondratyev, Key Issues of Global Change at The End of The Second Millennium, Energy and Environment, Volume 8, 1997, Issue 4, p. 279