http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2009/03/10/canada’s-carbon-sink-has-sprung-a-leak/

Canada’s carbon sink has sprung a leak

Until recently, its vast forests vacuumed up carbon dioxide. Now that process has been thrown in reverse.

Billions of tiny mountain pine beetles are treating Canada’s boreal forest like a 3,000-mile-long salad bar, transforming a key absorber of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas into a CO2 emitter instead.

In just a decade, exploding beetle populations and a rise in wildfires have flipped Canada’s boreal forest from its longstanding role as a natural carbon vacuum – sucking up 55 million or more tons of CO2 annually – to that of a giant tailpipe emitting up to 245 million tons of CO2 each year, according to the Canadian Forest Service.

That sharp about-face is raising questions about the future of northern forests worldwide that are being hit hard by global warming – including Russia’s massive boreal expanse, where wildfires have risen dramatically.

The trend has grown clearer in the past decade and was one reason that Canada did not count its forests as a carbon sink as part of the Kyoto climate treaty process: It couldn’t be sure they were…..

As someone who has worked in the construction industry, it is interesting to note that much of the lumber used to build homes in the SouthEast comes from BC.

It’s really sad that we have been in denial for so long. Al Gore wrote the first widely publicized warning in the late 1980s (Earth in the Balance), but very few of us took up the call for sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. If the U.S. had initiated the carbon tax he advocated as Vice President, the world would be in much less treacherous shape.

More than twenty years later, the Obama administration is advocating cap-and-trade policies which may or may not get through congress. Meanwhile, each new report from climate scientists suggests we may be approaching a point of no-return, when runaway heating shifts the earth’s temperature rapidly and radically into conditions that haven’t existed since before the dawn of humanity.

Anyone who isn’t deeply worried is simply not paying attention.

Oh, great. Al Gore. That’s just fodder for the mouthbreathers to avoid the science.

The problem isn’t the science - it’s the politicization.
The U.S. is notorious for denial, the chap in charge of the Smithsonian resigning over government perversion of science - but I know a Spanish professor online skeptical of human-emitted CO2 being a sufficient factor to rate as anything more than a stimulus to a natural process - heading irreversibly pell-mell on its way ?
Arctic permafrost thawing should release ridiculous amounts of CO2 and ice at the poles is shocking in its reduction of reflective albedo http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMWZS5DHNF_index_0.html : ice thickness also being reduced.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/  is likely as good a place as any to get a heads up on science stories if http://www.sciam.com/ and http://www.nationalgeographic.com/  aren’t a good enough start.

So your online spanish teacher denies that North America’s forests are being destroyed, which is releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere?

Spanish professor - not teacher.
I don’t even take the opinions of respected online friends - and I consider him one - as authoritative, just as a note to be considered. You likely will have to sign into Opera to talk on their forum to write to him - but if you can do it here you can do it there. The blog itself doesn’t require that to read it of course.
http://my.opera.com/nepmak2000/info/
As to what did he actually say ? My best understanding was that he considered ‘global warming’ an alarmist theory unsupported by sufficient data. Frankly, I think even that summation may be taking minor liberties with the truth - but it’s the best I can do.

Oops. I should have read that more closely.
The question of forest destruction was not addressed. Nor am I sure that he realizes that both east and west U.S. coasts are threatened- but he does read my posts as a news magazine, so it’s possible.
Hackmatack/Tamarack/Larch - one species with multiple names - are at risk in eastern forests and may vanish a an astounding rate - the pine borer I’m sure you know about in the west.
I did a quick look for my posts and couldn’t even spot them easily myself !

it’s true, much of the reality of the obvious “changes” in our climate and environment get bastardized by the political forces who seek to manipulate information in one direction or another for their own short-term political agenda.