I have not been able to find any other press coverage, but
Le Monde announces today that a German team presented today the disquieting results of a new scientific campaign to study the Siberian toundra, the main one being that
average temperature increased by 3°C since 1960 - three to four times more than the global average.
I found an article from Nature which talks about some parts of that campaign (extracts below), as well as this article which describes the measurement campaign.
SIBERIA-II: Sensor Systems and Data Products for Greenhouse Gas Accounting (pdf) by Christiane Schmullius, Sören Hese & SIBERIA-II Team, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Institute for Geography, Geoinformatics & Remote Sensing, Jena.
Climate Change - That Sinking Feeling
It took just one Siberian heatwave to temporarily wipe out most of the gains made by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. In the summer of 2003, wildfires raced across the region, incinerating an area of some 22 million hectares: slightly smaller than the state of Oregon. As the trees went up in smoke, they released about 250 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere -- roughly the same amount as industrialized countries have pledged to cut from their emissions by 2012 under the Kyoto agreement.
Natural releases of carbon -- from wild fires, thawing permafrost or drained peatlands -- aren't covered by the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. But if future political agreements are to save us from a climate catastrophe, experts agree that we need a much better understanding of natural carbon sources and sinks, and whether they can be manipulated to help put a brake on global warming.
Siberia looms large in this debate, its vast forests -- or taiga -- are a potentially huge sink for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Yet so little is known about Siberia's role in the global carbon cycle that researchers have been scrambling to gather basic data.
(...)
To that end, 14 institutes have taken part in the Siberia-II, a European Union-funded initiative to quantify the greenhouse-gas budget of a 2-million-square-kilometre area in central Siberia. A complementary project, called the Terrestrial Carbon Observing System, or TCOS, is providing more detailed, real-time measurements of carbon fluxes between Siberian forests and the lower levels of the atmosphere. Both projects, now approaching completion, have yielded a wealth of data. And one fact stands out: Siberia's taiga is a more modest carbon sink than previously thought.
That's been one of the big hopes of the American right- we don't need to make any efforts at home because we'll be able to capture very easily the same quantities of carbon emitted in "carbon sinks", i.e. natural phenomenons that capture that carbon. One of the most touted sinks was forests, which are supposed to absorb carbon as they grow. So you'd just need to plant trees and be home scot-free...
That study apparently makes it clear that this wish is not to be fulfilled.
Unlike tropical rain forests, where logging is the main disturbance to the carbon cycle, changes in the carbon balance in the taiga are being driven mainly by climate change. This makes these forests an ideal place to study the interplay between climate and landscape.
Siberia is also a climatic hot spot, with short warm summers and extremely long, cold winters. Temperatures vary greatly from year to year, but on average, surface temperatures in central Siberia have increased by up to 3 °C since 1960 -- three to four times more than the global average.
In a warmed world of the future, Siberia might see some short-term benefits. The warmer temperatures have already sparked a greening trend: spring arrives sooner and buds and leaves appear earlier in the growing season. To some extent, this counteracts the greenhouse effect, as growing plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Some Russian scientists and policy-makers critical of the Kyoto Protocol claim that a warmer climate will have positive effects on plant productivity and agriculture in Russia.
That's been an argument I have occasionally touted in jest - who cares about a few islands that get drowned, after all most of the land is in the Northern hemisphere and a lot of it is really cold - imagine a warmer Siberia, the "black earth" lands of Ukraine and southern Russia suddenly expanded 10 times, enough to feed the whole planet several times...
But this is not likely to happen:
But the growth spurt is unlikely to continue for ever, (...) "At some point, even though we don't know when, Siberian forests might begin to suffer from heat stress and die," he explains. And the long-term picture isn't much better. Although the natural fluctuations are large, and model predictions uncertain, many scientists believe that summers will become warmer and drier in Siberia.
This would favour the outbreak of fires, releasing carbon at an even greater rate, says Heiko Baltzer, head of Earth observation at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Monks Wood, UK.
Recent research shows that a warmer climate could also enhance soil respiration, permafrost thawing and the decomposition of organic matter in peat, moors and bogs -- all of which result in additional release of carbon. By the middle of this century, the planet's terrestrial biosphere could turn from a carbon sink into a carbon source -- and global warming would step up a gear.
So Siberia sounds like a runaway train waiting to happen.
Of course, the scientists want more data and more information to understand this all bettern but that programme seems to have provided a lot already and seems like a good base to build on:
Early results have shown not only that the taiga is a relatively modest sink for carbon, but that it may also give off more methane -- a strong greenhouse gas -- than previously thought. Both effects have yet to be fully quantified, but the two projects have made scientists more confident that they can account for the carbon budget for an area this large.
The preliminary findings have whetted scientists' appetite for more. In particular, Christiane Schmullius, a remote-sensing expert at Jena University in Germany, who coordinated Siberia-II, wants to use radar to monitor biomass from space. The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite carries a radar sensor, but its ability to determine the height and density of vegetation is limited.
"We have seen in Siberia that remote sensing has the potential to provide all the information needed for full greenhouse-gas accounting," says Schmullius. NASA plans to take advantage of that fact for its Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission, set to launch in 2008. This satellite will make global carbon dioxide maps twice a month, at a level of detail that would allow it to monitor changes such as those triggered by Siberian wildfires.
Siberia-II has substantially helped to reduce the uncertainties about carbon flux, says Sten Nilsson, a forest scientist at the IIASA. "Uncertainties used to be in the range of plus or minus 100%," he says. "Now we may have halved the margin of error."
So, soon, as global warming strikes with full force, we'll be in a position to know exactly how it happens. Isn't that wonderful?