A call to regulate carbon-offset providers

It was only a matter of time: Congress will consider legislation that supports the regulation of numerous upstart carbon-offset providers amid allegations of faulty and sometimes counterproductive results. The companies, which enjoyed increased popularity when former presidential hopeful Al Gore and current candidated John Edwards both claimed their above average energy consumption would be mitigated by personal investments in the companies’ carbon-offset programs, have offered no official response to claims made by several scientists that planting trees in the wrong climate zone can actually have the opposite effect as desired:

Discovery Channel :: News - Earth :: Tree-Planting Could Add to Warming
“Our study shows that only tropical rainforests are strongly beneficial in helping slow down global warming,” Govindasamy Bala, who led the research, said in a statement.

“It is a win-win situation in the tropics because trees in the tropics, in addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, promote convective clouds that help to cool the planet,” he said.

“In other locations, the warming from the albedo effect (sunlight absorption) either cancels or exceeds the net cooling from the other two effects,” said Bala, an atmospheric scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

All kidding aside, here’s a question–do we really completely understand the albedo effect?