Kirill Y. Kondratyev

During recent decades the stirring up of the processes of globalization practically in all spheres of present-day civilization activities has aggravated and brought forth numerous problems resulting from the nature-society (N-S) interaction. It has become apparent that to solve these problems it is necessary to develop new concepts and approaches to the interpretation of global environmental changes that would enable one to select the first-priority directions in studies and to reliably assess the state of the nature-society system (NSS). One of these priorities is to predict global climate change. The growing interest in the problem of global climate change, determined by its practical importance and by available contra­ dictory estimates of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, necessitates a systematization of knowledge of and data on the observed climate change and causes of this change. Despite an enormous amount of projects and programmes of studies of past and present climatic trends, the problem of reliable prediction of future climate change remains far from being solved. Emissions to the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (GHGs), mainly carbon dioxide, is considered as one of the main causes of an expected climate warming resulting in sufficiently negative consequences for humankind. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this book to construct a formalized technology to assess the levelof the greenhouse effectdue to anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide as well as the effects of other gas components.

The monograph being proposed for the English-speaking research community is concentrated on the atmospheric correction of satellite images as a part of thematic interpretation procedures while processing remote sensing data. For linguistic reasons a large section of the community may have been unaware of the progress made in Russia in this field of science and technology. Meanwhile, Russia was the first country to launch the first artificial satellite in 1957 and to obtain from space for the first time spectra of the Earth's atmosphere in the 1960's. New applications of the radiation transfer theory for the atmosphere­ underlying surface system appeared first in Russia in the 1970's. Direct and in­ verse problems of the atmospheric optics were then formulated giving the scientific basis for studies of natural resources from space. Since that time new mathematical treatments for the atmospheric correction procedures have been widely developed in Russia, including both analytical and numerical tech­ niques to simulate spectral, angular, and spatial distributions of the outgoing radiation in visual and infrared regions. The authors of the book were at the beginning of the scientific approach. A wide range of mathematical im­ provements to elaborate polinomial approximations for dependencies between atmospheric radiation field and parameters of space surveying was due to the necessity to process satellite images in real time using special software of ex­ isted computer means for the studies.

Professor Kondratyev and his team consider the concept of global warming due to the greenhouse effect and put forward a new approach to the problem of assessing the impact of anthropogenic processes. Considering data on both sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon and various conceptual schemes of the global carbon dioxide cycle, they suggest a new approach to studies of the problem of the greenhouse effect. They assess the role of different types of soil and vegetation in the assimilation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and discuss models of the atmosphere ocean gas exchange and its role in the carbon dioxide cycle, paying special attention to the role of the Arctic Basin. The authors also consider models of other global atmospheric cycles for a range of atmospheric constituents, and conclude by drawing together a range of scenarios on modelling the global carbon cycle.

The growing number of published works dedicated to global environmental change leads to the realization that protection of the natural environment has become an urgent problem. The question of working out principles of co­ evolution of man and nature is being posed with ever-increasing persistence. Scientists in many countries are attempting to find ways of formulating laws governing human processes acting on the environment. Numerous national and international programs regarding biosphere and climate studies contribute to the quest for means of resolving the conflict between human society and nature. However, attempts to find efficient methods of regulating human activity on a global scale encounter principal difficulties. The major difficulty is the lack of an adequate knowledge base pertaining to climatic and biospheric processes as wen as the largely incomplete state of the databases concerning global processes occurring in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and on land. Another difficulty is the inability of modern science to formulate the requirements which must be met by the global databases necessary for reliable evaluation of the state of the environ­ ment and fore casting its development for sufficiently long time intervals.

During recent decades the stirring up of the processes of globalization practically in all spheres of present-day civilization activities has aggravated and brought forth numerous problems resulting from the nature-society (N-S) interaction. It has become apparent that to solve these problems it is necessary to develop new concepts and approaches to the interpretation of global environmental changes that would enable one to select the first-priority directions in studies and to reliably assess the state of the nature-society system (NSS). One of these priorities is to predict global climate change. The growing interest in the problem of global climate change, determined by its practical importance and by available contra­ dictory estimates of the anthropogenic contribution to climate change, necessitates a systematization of knowledge of and data on the observed climate change and causes of this change. Despite an enormous amount of projects and programmes of studies of past and present climatic trends, the problem of reliable prediction of future climate change remains far from being solved. Emissions to the atmosphere of greenhouse gases (GHGs), mainly carbon dioxide, is considered as one of the main causes of an expected climate warming resulting in sufficiently negative consequences for humankind. Therefore, an attempt has been made in this book to construct a formalized technology to assess the levelof the greenhouse effectdue to anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide as well as the effects of other gas components.

In Stability of Life on Earth, Professor Kondratyev and his team show that the concept of biotic regulation is of fundamental importance in solving a wide range of environmental and other problems. They put forward a new approach to the solution of old environmental problems. Beginning with a look at the geographic environment and structural units within it, they show that ecosystems represent a set of homogeneous, closely-correlated communities of organisms and their environment. Biologists call such correlated communities ‘biogeocenoses’, and they are similar to the corporate structures in economic systems and interact competitively with each other. On the basis of competitive interaction in the biosphere, self-organisation and management take place. The authors show how human economic activity perturbed balances in natural biogeochemical cycles, eliminating and strongly modifying natural land cover, the 20th Century being the time when human activities ‘collided’ with Nature. They consider scientific bases for the stability and sustainability of life, and demonstrate how the scale and intensity of human-induced destruction of Nature and resultant feedback mechanisms have continuously expanded. They consider the likelihood of increasing numbers of natural disasters as a result of such activities, and propose that sustainable development should become a principal research topic during the 21st Century.

Professor Kondratyev and his team consider the concept of global warming due to the greenhouse effect and put forward a new approach to the problem of assessing the impact of anthropogenic processes. Considering data on both sources and sinks for atmospheric carbon and various conceptual schemes of the global carbon dioxide cycle, they suggest a new approach to studies of the problem of the greenhouse effect. They assess the role of different types of soil and vegetation in the assimilation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and discuss models of the atmosphere ocean gas exchange and its role in the carbon dioxide cycle, paying special attention to the role of the Arctic Basin. The authors also consider models of other global atmospheric cycles for a range of atmospheric constituents, and conclude by drawing together a range of scenarios on modelling the global carbon cycle.

The growing number of published works dedicated to global environmental change leads to the realization that protection of the natural environment has become an urgent problem. The question of working out principles of co­ evolution of man and nature is being posed with ever-increasing persistence. Scientists in many countries are attempting to find ways of formulating laws governing human processes acting on the environment. Numerous national and international programs regarding biosphere and climate studies contribute to the quest for means of resolving the conflict between human society and nature. However, attempts to find efficient methods of regulating human activity on a global scale encounter principal difficulties. The major difficulty is the lack of an adequate knowledge base pertaining to climatic and biospheric processes as wen as the largely incomplete state of the databases concerning global processes occurring in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and on land. Another difficulty is the inability of modern science to formulate the requirements which must be met by the global databases necessary for reliable evaluation of the state of the environ­ ment and fore casting its development for sufficiently long time intervals.