Nope. From a thermodynamic analysis, the energy is either reflected, turned into heat, or used to do work. Forests use more for work than any static object. The only open question in my mind is how much so. You do raise the point of emitting water vapor which adds a lot to the complexity. Also the rotting biomass will produce a lot of heat. But the production of dirt is probably still a net use of the energy. Remember, coal is old biomass and contains a lot of energy that came from the sun.

>> As an aside, I believe forests generate heat, just like any biological system.

You would be wrong in that. All chemical processes in the forest are ultimately powered by sunlight. Your body produces heat, but that's due to chemical reactions that primarily amount to burning fuel (fats are essentially hydrocarbons and the primary products of their "burning" is CO2 and H20 which exit through the lungs). Animals turn chemical energy into heat, but plants turn energy from light into chemical energy.

> Animals turn chemical energy into heat, but plants turn energy from light into chemical energy.

They do, but the heat is byproduct of that conversion. From the 2nd law of thermodynamics there will always be some residual heat (probably quite a lot, efficiency is given by the ratio of absolute temperatures between the heater and cooler, which is quite low in plants). And don't forget that plants also burn sugars to feed their processes. As I said, you can see for yourself in early spring that plants do indeed generate more heat than surrounding dead objects, such as rocks.

In any case, forests have, I believe, lower albedo than deforested landscape, so deforestation should cool the planet if anything. And one of the big arguments for global warming is that we observe more warming during the night, during the winter, towards poles and stratospheric cooling, which is again indicative that the problem is outgoing radiation being recaptured rather than more incoming radiation being reflected.