Sir

I question the view expressed in “Crunch time for Kyoto” (Nature 431, 12–13; 2004) that Russian attitudes towards the Kyoto Protocol are “heavily influenced by its dented pride and need for respect”, as a former superpower. I suggest that concerns held by members of the Russian Academy of Sciences about Kyoto, and their surprise at British delegates' complaints about the inclusion of climate-change ‘sceptics’, are shaped by disquieting memories of the Soviet era.

It is 40 years since the end of Trofim Lysenko's dictatorship over Soviet biology. A poorly educated agronomist, Lysenko gained political support during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s by denouncing conventional genetics as a “bourgeois deception” and promising improved crop yields on the basis of crude and unsubstantiated “experiments”. He became the autocrat of Stalinist science, with catastrophic results that linger today.

Lysenkoism was a tragic example of an illusion that became accepted as reality, despite all contrary evidence, because it was continually affirmed at meetings and by the media — see V. N. Soyfer's Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (tr. L. & R. Gruliow, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick; 1994). In 1965, Academician and Nobel prizewinner Nikolai N. Semyonov was finally able to write: “There is nothing more dangerous than blind passion in science. This is a direct path to unjustified self-confidence, to loss of self-criticalness, to scientific fanaticism, to false science. Given support from someone in power, it can lead to suppression of true science, and, since science is now a matter of state importance, to inflicting great injury on the country.”

Russian distrust of the interaction between science and politics remains strong. To many of the academicians, as to many of their colleagues around the world, the global-warming paradigm is far from ‘fact’, but objective debate is distorted by political and commercial interests. In this context, I suggest that it was perfectly reasonable for the academy's programme to include scientists with a range of viewpoints. It was unfortunate that the British delegation tried to exclude a selection of these because — as one member is reported as saying (Science 305, 319; 2004) — “We knew that we would not get to the scientific issues if we went down every rabbit hole of scepticism.”

The “sceptics” who were invited, including myself, were not speaking about the Kyoto Protocol. For my part, I argued against claims that malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases are spreading to new latitudes and altitudes because of climate change.

I feel no offence at being branded a sceptic — quite the contrary — but I never dreamt that I would hear a top Russian administrator at a Kremlin press conference refer to me, a British scientist, as a “dissident”, and to the representatives of the British government as “totalitarians” who had tried to “censor” me to protect their Party. Truly, an irony of history.