The Arctic Environmental Problems - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 577

Table 6.23 A model
estimation of the surplus CO 2
absorption by vegetation on
the Russian territory

Soil-plant formation Carbon ow absorbed by

vegetation (10 6

fl

t C/year)

Arctic deserts and tundra, sub-
arctic grasslands and marshes

3.2

Tundra, mountain- and forest-
tundra

10.7

North-taiga forests 11.8
Mid-taiga forests 33.2
South-taiga forests 24.9
The anthropogenicemission of carbon is assumed to be 6.5 GtC/
year

This study showed that the role of the Arctic Ocean in the global CO 2 balance was
estimated with low precision. Therefore, the Kyoto Protocol re ecting the problems

of climate warming via emission of greenhouse gases suffers from a lack of objective
reasons. In fact, existing climate models do not reliably re

fl

ect the correlation of
global temperature with anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. These models
do not take into consideration the role of biospheric processes in the land and oceans
(biotic regulation of the environment and the functioning of the ocean chemical
system). The Millennium Ecosystems Assessment Program can solve the problem of
global model synthesis in order to obtain forecasts of the dynamics of the NSS.
A summary of existing simulations of the global carbon dioxide cycle shows the
existence of long-term studies concerning this problem. The main conclusion is that
the exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and biosphere has spotty spatial
characteristics. This spottiness, taken into account in the models of the carbon
dioxide cycle, produces high errors. That is why the Kyoto Protocol conclusions
were based on incomplete estimations. There are many carbon

fl

flows (natural and
anthropogenic), mentioned in Fig. 1.30 , which have not been satisfactorily
described parametrically. The principal key questions relating to the exchange of
carbon between the atmosphere and the terrestrial pool of the above-ground bio-
mass, below-ground biomass, soils and hydrospheric systems are discussed by
Watson et al. (2000), Wigley and Schimel (2005), Emerson and Hedges (2008).
The Arctic Basin is the most weakly studied part of the biosphere in order to
understand its global role in the CO 2 absorption processes. Figure 6.26 demon-
strates the high variability in the forecasting of the carbon dioxide dynamics under
different anthropogenic scenarios:

fl

(1) the pessimistic scenario of Keeling and Bacastow (1977) describes a situation

where the ocean is role in the carbon exchange with the atmosphere is

restricted only to physical processes;

'

(2) the optimistic scenario of Bjorkstrom (1979) takes into account the ocean-

carbonate system under the parameterization of the H 2 and H 3 fl

flows in Fig. 1.30 ;

(3) the scenario of the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Watson

et al. 2000), is based on speci c activity requirements concerning land-use

strategy (e.g. planting versus regeneration through silvicultural activities); and