Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was “bogus”. Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake’s query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
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.
Nepstad told me the same thing in response to my query after Leake’s story was published. He included copies of his relevant papers which confirmed what he told me. Nepstad goes into more detail here:
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 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.
Leake deliberately concealed the fact that error in the IPCC was a missing cite, rather than a factual error. Furthermore, despite criticizing the IPCC for allegedly relying on “green campaigners who had little scientific expertise” Leake based his story on “Research by Richard North”. Richard North is part of a right wing think tank which describes his background like this:
After a brief career in the Royal Air Force, Richard North became a local government officer and then ran his own consultancy business for two decades. He then moved into trade politics and thence to the European Parliament as research director for the group of European Democracies and Diversities. Through this professional work, Richard obtained first hand experience of the damaging effects of Brussels directives and their interpretation by UK officials on British businesses, and has gained an unrivalled insight into the workings of the European Union.
So, to Leake, lack of scientific expertise doesn’t matter if someone is telling you what you want to hear.
Leakegate is merely the latest scandal about the reporting on climate science in British newspapers and follows on the heels of Rosegate, the scandal about David Rose’s repeated misquoting of scientists.
Update: Mongabay.com comments
But Leake’s apparent dismissal of Nepstad’s data isn’t what may get him into trouble. Instead it’s his breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice which requires editors to allow “a fair opportunity for reply.” Andrew Rowell, the lead author of the WWF report who was criticized by Leake, was never contacted by the Sunday Times.