Yet now that this fake scandal has been exposed, including in an important account by the Guardian’s George Monbiot, North has – perhaps unsurprisingly – been pouring scorn all over that paper’s comment pages. More significantly, after Monbiot noted North’s well-deserved reputation as an “egregious fabulist” “nearly all of” whose “concocted” “stories” (and Booker’s) “fall apart on the briefest examination”, North proceeded to threaten Monbiot and the Guardian with libel action. North referred to “all references to myself” in Monbiot’s blog post “as being libellous and highly damaging”.

Certainly the audacity of North’s double-standards alone here is fairly remarkable. Elsewhere on his blog, he not only berates environmentalists for their censorious tendencies (“These big girls’ blouses can dish it out but when it comes to dealing with disagreement … [a]lways they have to be in control of the message”) but attacks WWF as “an organisation which is turning lying into an art form”. Clearly, if North’s litigious standards were redirected back towards him, he would find himself in serious trouble.

But more importantly, in the tradition of unintentional self-satire in which he has become a master, North appears to have been endeavouring to confirm every one of Monbiot’s accusations even in his comments on the blog post in question. Virtually every one of these – which culminate in his legal threat – produces a flat-out falsehood, painfully embarrassing error or egregious misrepresentation.

Perhaps this sounds like an exaggeration. So in case readers are inclined to be sceptical, let us take a few examples.

Did the IPCC predict that 40% of the Amazon will be decimated?

Falsehood (in North’s 15th comment):

“the IPCC [made] a cataclysmic prediction about 40 percent of the biggest rainforest on the planet.”

Falsehood (in North’s 19th comment):

“And, unless I got it terribly wrong, it was the IPCC saying that the 40% of the Amazon basin was going belly-up.”

Needless to say, North got it terribly wrong. The first sentence of the statement made by the IPCC was the following:

“Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”.

The statement made is purely hypothetical. Clearly, the IPCC was doing no more here than outlining a major sensitivity and therefore serious risk to up to 40% of the Amazon in response to small changes in precipitation.

Does the IPCC identify climate change as the cause of this hypothetical “slight reduction in rainfall”?

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement … misidentif[ies] climate change (as in its “slight reduction in rainfall”) as the proximate cause of the forest decline.”

The relevant IPCC statement actually makes no mention of climate change: it is purely hypothetical, and does not in and of itself identify any proximate cause of any forest decline.

Was the claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 a “deliberate mistake”?

Falsehood (in North’s 12th comment):

“It is vital to the IPCC which has build its Maginot Line on “Glaciergate”, conceding one mistake and only one mistake (not that it was a mistake – it was deliberate).”

To date there has been no evidence that the IPCC “deliberately” made the mistake about the date Himalayan glaciers could disappear – a mistake it has acknowledged and corrected.

Was the claim about the Amazon’s sensitivity backed up by the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“this is not “science” talking, but money talking. And what does “money” say? …. er

““Well chaps, we can’s [sic] actually find any peer-reviewed stuff that says “40 percent of the Amazon forest may be drastically altered by even a slight drop in precitation” … so we’ll fudge it …”

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“But what about [scientific paper] Nepstad 2004? “New rainfall data showed that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die” [a quotation from Nepstad’s own clarificatory statement when the original “Amazongate” story broke]. Are we referring to a “slight drop in precipitation”? … Er … no. Scratch Nepstad 2005 [sic] … irrelevant.”

So can we “actually find any peer-reviewed stuff that says “40 percent of the Amazon forest may be drastically altered by even a slight drop in precitation””? “Are we referring to a “slight drop in precipitation”?” Er, well yes we are, and yes we can. In their 2004 paper in Global Change Biology, Tropical forest expert Dan Nepstad and his team are explicit:

“This study points to the widespread effect of drought on Amazon forests, and the vulnerability of Amazon forests to small declines in rainfall or increases in ET [evapo-transpiration]. Rainfall and ET are nearly equal across the Amazon during most years, with total rainfall falling below ET during years of severe drought. Such droughts may become more common if ENSO [El-Nino] events continue to be frequent and severe, if rainfall is inhibited by deforestation or smoke, and if warming trends continue. Increases in ET of only 15% or similar reductions in rainfall can lead to severe soil moisture deficits over roughly half of the Amazon (Fig. 9).

“The increase in forest flammability associated with severe drought poses one of the greatest threats to the ecological integrity of Amazon forests.”

Not only does the peer-reviewed scientific literature support the IPCC’s claim – that “[u]p to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” – directly, then, but it actually surpasses it. Roughly half the Amazon is of course a great deal more than “up to 40%” (though note that a range of possibilities is implied in both cases). Is Nepstad’s 2004 paper “irrelevant”? Hardly.

Did the IPCC’s statement on the sensitivity of the Amazon exaggerate?

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement is … a major overstatement of the case …”

The IPCC’s departure from the peer-reviewed scientific record normally causes all manner of vociferous complaint from North. Yet as we have seen, Nepstad’s peer-reviewed 2004 paper states that “roughly half of the Amazon” could suffer “severe soil moisture deficits” in response to even small rainfall reductions; stresses “the vulnerability of Amazon forests to small declines in rainfall”; and states that “[t]he increase in forest flammability associated with severe drought poses one of the greatest threats to the ecological integrity of Amazon forests.” The IPCC, on the other hand, suggests that “[u]p to 40% of the Amazonian forests” could “react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. Exaggeration? Not exactly.

Is the IPCC’s statement in its entirety supported by the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Falsehood (in North’s 4th comment):

“Certainly, in the context, of the IPCC statement, [sic] its supporters have not yet been able to offer any single paper or combination of papers which supports the statement in its entirely.”

We have already seen that the peer-reviewed literature supports the IPCC’s first claim here, about the Amazon’s sensitivity to small reductions in rainfall. What of the statements that follow, then? The IPCC goes on to state that:

“this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation”.

Could this claim possibly be supported by a “single paper or combination of papers”? Well, er, yes. As Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds notes in a 2006 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

“There are critical thresholds of water availability below which tropical forests cannot persist and are replaced by savanna systems.”

Lewis further lists among his “four plausible routes” for the future of the Amazon “widespread forest collapse via drought, and widespread forest collapse via fire”. As he goes on:

“A warming and drying world leading to the loss of half of the world’s largest tract of tropical forest, and accelerated climate change is, therefore, a plausible scenario requiring urgent attention.”

Could such a collapse happen rapidly in the Amazon? Some of the key evidence on this question is provided in a 2004 paper in Theoretical and Applied Climatology by the Hadley Centre’s Peter Cox and his team. As these authors state, in one global climate model run:

“the extreme warming and drying eventually lead to abrupt reductions in the forest fraction”.

As they continue in commentary on modelled projections:

““When the forest fraction begins to drop (from about 2040 onwards) C4 grasses initially expand to occupy some of the vacant lands. However, the relentless warming and drying make conditions unfavourable even for this plant functional type, and the Amazon box ends as predominantly bare-soil (area fraction >0.5) by 2100 … it seems clear that the HadCM3LC [climate model-derived projections of] climate change in Amazonia would lead to rainforest loss (perhaps via increased fire frequency), and therefore drastic land-cover change.”

The precipitous collapse of the Amazon rainforest produced by one such model run is captured in a graph Cox and colleagues include in their paper – made more conservative in that it “ignore[s] both direct anthropogenic deforestation and also natural fire disturbance”:

This “alarming loss of the Amazonian rainforest”, Cox and his colleagues write, “would have catastrophic impacts on the biodiversity and “ecosystem services” of Amazonia, similar to those anticipated under the most extreme scenarios of direct human deforestation”.

Did the IPCC make an erroneous, unfounded statement?

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“So what [evidence] have we got? Nothing … rien … nada … SFA.”

Falsehood (in North’s 14th comment):

“the IPCC allegation is still unfounded.”

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement … is also wrong”

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“The only way, therefore, to fix Amazongate is for the IPCC to do the decent thing and admit it is wrong.”

Falsehood (in North’s 12th comment):

““Amazongate”, however, “lives” because the IPCC got it wrong … made an unfounded assertion and has since been trying to cover up …”

Yet, as can easily be demonstrated, judging by the peer-reviewed scientific evidence readily available at the time, the IPCC did not “get it wrong” or make an “unfounded” statement. North, on the other hand, did – repeatedly and unrepentantly.

That a published writer should issue this many blatant falsehoods in a comment thread is pretty extraordinary. To do so and then to threaten legal action on the basis that references to oneself as an “egregious fabulist” whose concocted stories “almost all … fall apart on the briefest examination” are “libellous and highly damaging” is … well, frankly suspicious. We are inevitably tempted to the conclusion that Richard North is an ingenious satirical creation – a kind of Dave Spart for the UKIP fanbase.

The bungling continues

North’s criticisms here are fairly easily rebutted with reference to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It should be stressed, though, that none of these papers claims to provide a perfect, crystal ball-style vision of the future. Rather, they build on rough projections based on our current knowledge – in all its varying degrees of provisionality, approximation and incompleteness. Sometimes this will involve looking for lessons from similar examples in biological history. In other cases it will involve feeding the observed dynamics of complex systems into powerful computerised models. Such models are not just guesswork – they can generally be projected back into the past as well as the future, allowing us at least a rough test of their accuracy through direct comparison with our observations. The evidence assembled will produce a variety of results and scenarios among scientists and in the scientific literature, from the ultra-conservative to the utterly cataclysmic. What none of them provides – or claims to provide – is absolute certainty.

Yet when Monbiot presented some of the scientific data North had ignored – including Cox’s 2004 paper and another alarming paper on potential future scenarios for the Amazon from Theoretical and Applied Climatology by Richard Betts and his team – in a further post, North’s response proved extraordinary.

North claimed that the papers’ “application of GCM [global climate models] and coupled climate models to the Amazon … has been questioned by Oyama and Nobre (2003) and Merengo [sic] 2006” – another pair of scientific papers, from Geophysical Research Letters and the Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia respectively. It took another commenter to inquire how – in the first case – a 2003 paper could possibly have criticised two papers published in 2004. North replied: “Well, that’s how things often work … the Cox et al work wasn’t particuarly new …” There is a half-truth dangling here, as the 2004 paper followed an earlier, 2000 Nature paper by the same authors. Yet as a brief look at the citations confirms, neither Cox’s 2004 paper, Betts’ 2004 paper, nor any other paper by either of these authors is referenced by Oyama and Nobre.

As for Jose Marengo’s paper, what scathing criticism does this make of global climate models? Here’s what it has to say (in a slightly broken English translation) in its abstract:

“… more complex models and representations on the dynamics of vegetation on regional climate have allowed to more realistic simulations of climate change due to changes in land use and in the concentration of greenhouse gases on the recent years.”

Devastating stuff. But it gets worse. North’s sole reason for citing Marengo is an attempt to rebut Cox and Betts’ papers on the Amazon. Here’s what Marengo has to say specifically about these two papers:

“New developments in physical parameterizations, including more sophisticated and complex schemes for clouds and the dynamics of the vegetation have provided new insights on possible future climates in Amazonia as consequence of global warming (Cox et al. 2000, 2004, Betts et al. 2004).”

Witness the blistering, evidence-based rebuttal of Richard North. A paper that does not reference – and was even published before – those North disputes; and another whose evaluation of these papers is explicitly positive.

Given all this, you might wonder what on earth North is talking about. Why does he cite either paper at all? He gives us a brief clue in a further comment on Marengo’s paper:

“What struck me was the observation that: “Even though we know now more than we knew 20 years ago, still there are some uncertainties in the tendencies of climate and water resources during the 20th Century.” That and his discussion of “significant uncertainties” tends [sic] to act as a counterbalance to the apparent certitude offered by some modellers.”

Which begs the – frankly exasperated – question: what “apparent certitude”? A search of the 2004 Cox paper for the term “certainty” produces 8 results. Of these, all 8 are expressions of uncertainty. Nepstad’s 2004 paper yields 2 results, both expressions of uncertainty. Betts’ paper yields a starker picture: 28 results, 27 relevant (1 using “certain” in a different sense) of which all 27 are references to uncertainties in predictions and areas of understanding. Any “apparent certitude” can only be a result either of failing to read the papers in question, or of a painfully exacting, wilful misreading of their contents.

The implications for journalism

All this may seem rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, albeit a very persistent nut. Yet one of the most profoundly disturbing conclusions to be drawn from the “Amazongate” episode is that North’s claims are in no way assured the utter obscurity they so richly deserve. They find their way onto the Telegraph’s blogs and comment pages, frequently via North’s collaborator Christopher Booker. Last week, Booker was at it again, accusing the IPCC of making a “wildly alarmist claim it cannot justify”; stating that “it seems clearer than ever that there is no good evidence” to support the IPCC; that “other papers in support of their claim [were cited] – but none of these provided any support for the specific claim about the impact of climate change made by the IPCC”; and that it “seems to be [un]true” that “the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence”. In this case, they found their way onto the pages of Times, in a murky episode that may have involved top-down editorial changes to an article producing grossly distorted reportage.

Moreover, this is part of a wider disturbing picture. Editorial pressure to go after climate scientists has been applied in newsrooms since February (a claim that comes via a reliable inside source). Elsewhere in Murdoch outlets, top-down pressure is known to have distorted and distended reporting on climate change. For any journalists managing to survive this institutional firestorm intact and considering using North as a source of material in future, I hope his performance here will give them pause. Try as he may to defend it with legal threats, nothing has been more fatal to North’s “professional reputation” than the man’s own shocking record of falsehood and misrepresentation.

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• Will 2010 be the hottest year on record? – it all depends on which data source you choose: GISTEMP (likely) or HadCRU (about as likely as not).
• Climate change is leaving us with extra space junk – Even the space junk is trying to tell us we’re changing the climate. One more independent line of evidence to add to the pile, how many do we need?!
• Black Carbon’s Grey Areas – A brilliant, must-read article on black carbon. Who would have thought it has such broad geopolitical implications? Worth the effort. It’s conclusions: 1. Stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem. 2. Target diesel. 3. Be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.
• Ocean acidification – still happening.
• Arctic climate may be more sensitive to warming than thought – “Our findings indicate that CO2 levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F) [19 degrees Celsius warmer than today!],” Ballantyne said. “As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic.”
• Network Rail study to assess impact of climate change – eco-stealth taxes are being used to… strengthen our vulnerable rail network, oh.
• Troubling ice melt in East Antarctica – it’s losing mass, which is not good. – “It’s too early to know what the ice loss in East Antarctica really means, says Isabella Velicogna, a remote-sensing specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “What is important is to see what’s generating the mass loss,” she says. Reductions in snowfall, for example, might reflect short-term weather cycles that could reverse at any time. But thinning caused by accelerating glaciers—as seen in West Antarctica—would warrant concern.”
• Peru inventor ‘whitewashes’ peaks to slow glacier melt – In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed boilersuits diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country’s melting glaciers. Peru’s Environment Minister Antonio Brack has said the World Bank’s 200,000 dollars in funding would be better spent on other “projects which would have more impact in mitigating climate change.” “It’s nonsense”, he commented bluntly last year.
• Leakegate: A retraction – “It is an open question as to what impact these retractions and apologies have, but just as with technical comments on nonsense articles appearing a year after the damage was done, setting the record straight is a important for those people who will be looking at this at a later date, and gives some hope that the media can be held (a little) accountable for what they publish.”

And finally, on a slight tangent:

• Ben Goldacre: Yeah well you can prove anything with science – “When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

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Lewis said he was contacted by the Sunday Times before the article was published and told them the IPCC’s statement was “poorly written and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct”. He added that “there is a wealth of scientific evidence suggesting that the Amazon is vulnerable to reductions in rainfall”. He also sent the newspaper several scientific papers that supported the claim, but were not cited by that section of the IPCC report.

…

Lewis also complains that the Sunday Times used several quotes from him in the piece to support the assertion that the IPCC report had made a false claim. “Despite repeatedly stating to the Sunday Times that there is no problem with the sentence in the IPCC report, except the reference.”

Climate Safety originally covered the bogus claims:

As Lewis made clear in correspondence, the problem was not with the accuracy of the IPCC’s statement, which reflected the peer-reviewed scientific literature – but with the reference that had been attributed to it. The issue had in fact already been dealt with in the report of Working Group I (on “The Physical Science Basis” of climate change), which had got the references right. Did Leake’s article accurately reflect Lewis’ views? “Absolutely not.”

Lewis, it turns out, had sent both Leake and Harrabin the same email. But while Harrabin had included Lewis’s comments on the IPCC’s accuracy in his BBC piece, Leake simply ignored them. Instead, he seems to have invented his own, more congenial version of reality. “4000-page report makes insignificant referencing error” is admittedly a rather less powerful headline – even if it does possess the distinct advantage of being true.

More astonishingly, as science blogger Eli Kintisch revealed, Leake had been told exactly the same thing by Dan Nepstad – author of a 1999 Nature paper cited by WWF, and others that back up the IPCC on the Amazon – two days before his story was published.

Interestingly, the Guardian article doesn’t name the journalist in question, Jonathan Leake. Readers who also follow Tim Lambert over at Deltoid will be all too familiar with Mr. Leake. Tim Lambert’s research shows that, among other things, he:

• Was responsible for the bogus story about Google’s carbon footprint
• Made up a story about heart attacks falling after the smoking ban
• Misrepresented Richard Dawkins
• Misrepresented Bruce Hood
• Broke an embargo and got the Sunday Times banned from EurekAlert, an outlet which provides journalists access to embargoed science stories.
• Did the same with JAMA, a medical list, with the same outcome
• Misrepresented the IPCC on tropical cyclone trends
• Quoted a scientist who had refused to speak to him!

All of this led Lambert to post:

Here’s a game you can play at home. All you need is a search engine. Take a Jonathan Leake science story with a dramatic headline. For example, Facebook fans do worse in exams. Then do a search on the headline. You win if you can find complaints by scientists that their research was misrepresented by Leake. Like this.

…

Try the game, it’s fun!

Of the whole AmazonGate/LeakeGate affair, we originally concluded:

While it is wholly unsurprising that the denial lobby should be attempting to push baseless and misleading stories to the press, what is surprising is the press’s willingness to swallow them. In this case, two experts in the relevant field told a Times journalist explicitly that, in spite of a minor referencing error, the IPCC had got its facts right. That journalist simply ignored them. Instead, he deliberately put out the opposite line – one fed to him by a prominent climate change denier – as fact. The implications are deeply disturbing, not only for our prospects of tackling climate change, but for basic standards of honesty and integrity in journalism.

Let’s hope the Press Complaints Commission steps up… then again, don’t hold your breath.

Update: Climate Progress has an excellent post on the same subject.

Update 2: Leake botches another story, this time on UK wind power.

Update 3: Sunday Times admits story was ‘flawed’, offers to print Lewis’s original letter, Lewis rejects.

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This latest feeding frenzy kicked off when one erroneous claim – that Himalayan glaciers were “very likely” to disappear by 2035 – was found to have slipped through the net, the IPCC’s extensive review process having failed to weed it out prior to publication. The claim was included on page 493 of the IPCC’s second 1000-page Working Group report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” (WGII). The reference given was to a WWF report – part of the non-peer-reviewed “grey literature” that makes up a periphery of the material in the second Working Group’s report.

Marginal as it may have been, for the media this isolated error appears to have opened the floodgates. A hysterical flurry of activity followed, as the denial lobby began trawling through the IPCC report for anything else that might look bad – particularly anything referencing the grey literature. The results of this search were then fed to elements of the press, who eagerly snatched them up – uncritically repeating many of their claims in the process.

Blogger Richard North was the originator of one such story. North is a climate change denier who has worked with the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker on a number of publications, including most recently Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. In the words of sceptical writer Richard Wilson, the book is a “surrealist masterpiece”, claiming to debunk “the dangers of passive smoking, white asbestos, eating BSE-infected beef, CO2 emissions, leaded petrol, dioxins, and high-speed car driving”. Examining the book’s commentary on climate change, one atmosphere physicist noted that its “references are very selective and misrepresentative”; another concluded: “[t]hese people have added two and two and got five”. The book misrepresents and even reverses the findings of published scientific literature, and includes a fabricated interview with a Cambridge astrophysicist that had long since been retracted. As the Guardian’s Robin McKie puts it in his review of the book, Booker and North “accuse other journalists of ‘unthinking credulity’ but commit egregious errors that would shame a junior reporter.”

Christopher Booker, North’s co-writer on the book, has himself claimed that white asbestos is “chemically identical to talcum powder”, receiving repeated condemnations from the UK’s Health and Safety Executive for his “misinformed” and “substantially misleading” articles on the subject. He has also denied the link between passive smoking and lung cancer, between BSE and CJD in humans, and, astonishingly, claimed that proponents of Darwinian evolutionary theory “rest their case on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions”.

One might have expected such corners of crankery to be passed over by most mainstream journalists, or at least left to fester on the Telegraph’s comment pages. But these sources are not only being read – they are finding their “research” used as the foundation for major news stories.

Bogus claims and the threat to the Amazon

On January 25^th, North published a post on his blog in which he dredged up one suspicious-looking claim made by the IPCC. On page 596, the second Working Group report had stated that “40% of the Amazon forests could react drastically to even a slight change in precipitation”, potentially being replaced by “ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas”. Again, the reference given was to a WWF report – in this case a Global Review of Forest Fires by a policy analyst, Dr PF Moore, and a journalist and campaigner, Andy Rowell. Apparently unable to find the information given by the IPCC in WWF’s report, North wrote:

“The assertions attributed to them, that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” is nowhere to be found in their report. … Nor elsewhere can we find any other reference to 40 percent of the Amazon being affected by even slight reductions in precipitation.”

Yet the fourteenth page of WWF’s report had stated exactly that. “Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall”, the report noted.

Nevertheless, North went to town, declaring the unearthing of “Amazongate”. He accused the IPCC of making “false predictions on the Amazon rain forests”; of producing “a complete fabrication”; stated that “the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest”; that it “wanted to hype up crisis” by “making an assertion unsupported by the “science” it holds as so important”.

The allegation was quickly repeated by a sympathetic blogger on the fringes of the mainstream media, James Delingpole of the Telegraph – himself a frenetic climate change denier and far-right conspiracy theorist (he has recently stated that mainstream climate scientists “are part of a global conspiracy to expand” the state – apparently on the basis of no evidence whatsoever). Delingpole eagerly posted the story on his blog, declaring “AGW [man-made global warming] theory is toast.”

A few days later, the story found its way onto the news pages of the Times, via reporter Jonathan Leake. “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim”, the story’s headline declared, its first paragraph telling readers the IPCC’s statement on the Amazon was “based on an unsubstantiated claim”. The last line of the article leaves us in no doubt as to its source: “Research by Richard North”.

But it soon emerged that the claim was far from bogus. If anything, in fact, the 40% estimate may have been understated. Simon Lewis, a researcher into tropical forests at the University of Leeds, was quoted by Leake as criticizing WWF’s report. Yet Lewis had already informed Leake that the IPCC’s statement got it right. As BBC journalist Roger Harrabin quoted Lewis:

“The IPCC statement is basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced.

“It is very well known that in Amazonia, tropical forests exist when there is more than about 1.5 metres of rain a year, below that the system tends to ‘flip’ to savannah.

“Indeed, some leading models of future climate change impacts show a die-off of more than 40% Amazon forests, due to projected decreases in rainfall.

“The most extreme die-back model predicted that a new type of drought should begin to impact Amazonia, and in 2005 it happened for the first time: a drought associated with Atlantic, not Pacific sea surface temperatures.

“The effect on the forest was massive tree mortality, and the remaining Amazon forests changed from absorbing nearly two billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere a year, to being a massive source of over three billion tonnes.”

As Lewis made clear in correspondence, the problem was not with the accuracy of the IPCC’s statement, which reflected the peer-reviewed scientific literature – but with the reference that had been attributed to it. The issue had in fact already been dealt with in the report of Working Group I (on “The Physical Science Basis” of climate change), which had got the references right. Did Leake’s article accurately reflect Lewis’ views? “Absolutely not.”

Lewis, it turns out, had sent both Leake and Harrabin the same email. But while Harrabin had included Lewis’s comments on the IPCC’s accuracy in his BBC piece, Leake simply ignored them. Instead, he seems to have invented his own, more congenial version of reality. “4000-page report makes insignificant referencing error” is admittedly a rather less powerful headline – even if it does possess the distinct advantage of being true.

More astonishingly, as science blogger Eli Kintisch revealed, Leake had been told exactly the same thing by Dan Nepstad – author of a 1999 Nature paper cited by WWF, and others that back up the IPCC on the Amazon – two days before his story was published. As Nepstad had written to Leake:

“At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is necessary to sustain dense forest. We published an article in 1994 in Nature in which we estimated that approximately half of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon were periodically exposed to severe drought and soil moisture depletion, especially during El Nino events.”

As Nepstad later wrote in a public statement on the affair:

“The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct, but the citations listed in the Rowell and Moore report were incomplete. (The authors of this report interviewed several researchers, including the author of this note, and had originally cited the IPAM website where the statement was made that 30 to 40% of the forests of the Amazon were susceptible to small changes in rainfall). Our 1999 article (Nepstad et al. 1999) estimated that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998, as [WWF authors] Rowell and Moore correctly state, but this forest area is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon. In another article published in Nature, in 1994, we used less conservative assumptions to estimate that approximately half of the forests of the Amazon depleted large portions of their available soil moisture during seasonal or episodic drought (Nepstad et al. 1994). After the Rowell and Moore report was released in 2000, and prior to the publication of the IPCC AR4, new evidence of the full extent of severe drought in the Amazon was available. In 2004, we estimated that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998. This estimate incorporated new rainfall data and results from an experimental reduction of rainfall in an Amazon forest that we had conducted with funding from the US National Science Foundation (Nepstad et al. 2004). Field evidence of the soil moisture critical threshold is presented in Nepstad et al. 2007.”

To give him some credit, Leake’s “bogus” headline has now been changed – though his “unsubstantiated” accusation remains. Meanwhile, things have gone full circle: the story is being cited in its original form on the website of climate deniers – and mining industry front-group – the Global Warming Policy Foundation, replete with the added credibility its status as a Times story gives it.

While it is wholly unsurprising that the denial lobby should be attempting to push baseless and misleading stories to the press, what is surprising is the press’s willingness to swallow them. In this case, two experts in the relevant field told a Times journalist explicitly that, in spite of a minor referencing error, the IPCC had got its facts right. That journalist simply ignored them. Instead, he deliberately put out the opposite line – one fed to him by a prominent climate change denier – as fact. The implications are deeply disturbing, not only for our prospects of tackling climate change, but for basic standards of honesty and integrity in journalism.

More to follow …

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