And to think that some people consider children to be the light of their lives: Children and Their Carbon Legacy: A Way to be an Eco-Hero?

The average lifetime emissions of people living in the United States is 1,644 tons of carbon. If you live in the United States and have a child, the average carbon legacy of that child will be 9,441 tons – that is how much extra carbon you are responsible for because you had that child, and it includes all of the carbon emitted by that child and his or her descendants before that lineage dies out given current birth and death rates in the United States.

Guardian desperately flogs the climate scam: "Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say"

Global warming will wreck attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, according to a devastating new study which predicts that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature rises.

Jan '09: New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests - NYTimes.com

By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.