A Silent Spring for climate change?

摘要

"Blame the trees!" shrieked a British newspaper, the Daily Mail. "Cutting down the rain forests may actually be a way of preventing global warming!" This and other similarly ill-considered headlines marked the publication of a recent paper in Nature (439, 187-191; 2006) reporting methane emission from living plants. Such emissions would constitute only a minor offset to the huge carbon sink the world's forests represent, but the message given to the public was at best confused and at worst downright misleading.