Tropical Forests May Not Be Saving Us From Global Warming After All: Study - International Business Times: "Until now, tropical forests were considered to be among the planet's strongest allies in the battle against global warming. But a new study suggests that these forests may be releasing carbon into the earth's atmosphere, in amounts large enough to mitigate the carbon-absorbing effects."
A six-year experiment in a rainforest at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, Central America, found that dead plant material that falls to the ground in a tropical forest triggers an effect called "priming" where fresh carbon from plant litterfall provides energy to micro-organisms, which in turn stimulates the decomposition of carbon stored in the soil.
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