Is the Amazon forest dying?

As the light plane banked left, the smell of smoke reached the cockpit. The landscape below was an ashen green, the sun above an orange glow behind sooty billows of grey.

The Amazon forest was burning, and it was more than a sign of human encroachment. It was also the sight and scent of a dangerous chemistry, of tonnes of carbon dioxide – transformed from wood and leaf – rising into an atmosphere already loaded with it.

In cooler confines some days later, at an international climate conference in Argentina, British scientists told of a different, slow-motion kind of chemistry in the tropical forest, one foreseen by supercomputers running intricately programmed models of global warming.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2005/3/8/features/10160395&sec=features