Sunday Times admits 'Amazongate' story was rubbish. But who's to blame?

Newspaper has apologised over the IPCC's Amazon claim, but questions remain over how falsehoods made it into print

• Roy Greenslade: Sunday Times apologises for climate story
• Forests expert officially complains about 'distorted' article

A boat sits near a huge sand bank near Santarem in Brazil's Amazon state of Para. Photograph: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace

It's a distressing sight but we'll have to get used to it: most of the world's prominent climate change deniers skewered on their own sword.

The weapon which has turned so cruelly against them is the revelation, paraded in triumph by the egregious fabulist Richard North in January, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had "grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rainforest". The panel's fourth assessment report had claimed that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation". Reduced rainfall could rapidly destroy the forests, which would be replaced with savannahs.

This claim, North asserted, "seems to be a complete fabrication". It was sourced to a report for the environmental group WWF, written by a journalist and a forest policy analyst. But even that report, North insisted, did not contain the information the IPCC used. He maintained that:

"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."

With startling originality, he dubbed the controversy "Amazongate", a term which soon travelled round the world.

Other deniers, being the herd animals we know and love, leapt on his claims and bore them off, cackling with delight, without apparently pausing for a moment to check them.

In the Telegraph, James Delingpole, who seldom misses an opportunity to make an idiot of himself, announced that these revelations meant:

"AGW [anthropogenic global warming] theory is toast. So's Dr Rajendra Pachauri. So's the Stern review. So's the credibility of the IPCC."

In reality, as we will see, it's Delingpole's beliefs on climate change that the story has reduced to toast.

Like the hundreds of others who fell head first into this trap, he should have been more cautious. Richard North is our old friend Christopher Booker's long-term collaborator, and between them they are responsible for more misinformation than any other living journalists. You could write a book about the stories they have concocted, almost all of which fall apart on the briefest examination.

This one was no exception. I decided to check North's claim that the WWF report (pdf) said nothing about 40% of the Amazon's forests reacting badly to a reduction in rainfall. I used a cunning and recondite technique known only to experienced sleuths: typing "40%" in the search bar at the top of the page.

This stroke of genius took all of 10 seconds to reveal the following passage:

"Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall."

Who says investigative journalism is dead?

None of North's suckers had bothered to carry out this complex procedure. They hadn't bothered because they didn't want to spoil a good story.

North was right to point out that the IPCC should not have relied on a report by WWF for its predictions about the Amazon. Or he would have been right if it had. But it hadn't. The projection was drawn from a series of scientific papers by specialists in this field, published in peer-reviewed journals, some of which are referenced in the first section of the IPCC's 2007 report (pdf).

The IPCC had made a mistake in referencing the claim in the second section of its 2007 report. It had no reason to use WWF as its source when the material originated in peer-reviewed scientific papers. But an organisation which made no referencing errors in a report of several thousand pages would be an organisation run not by humans but gods. It was a silly but manifestly trivial mistake.

With the inevitability – talking of gods - of a Greek tragedy, hubris was followed by nemesis. The story was picked up by Jonathan Leake, the environment editor at the Sunday Times. He wrote what appears initially to have been a sensible article about the controversy. He quoted at length the expert in tropical forests and climate change Dr Simon Lewis. Dr Lewis criticised the IPCC's sloppy referencing but pointed out that the 40% claim was well supported by the science.

As Lewis explained in his subsequent appeal to the Press Complaints Commission:

"The entire article was read to me, and quotes by me agreed, including a statement that the science in the IPCC report was and is correct. The article was reasonable, and quotes were not out of context."

But between Leake's checking of the copy with Lewis and its publication, something happened. An article which explained the context, applied proper scientific caution and gave both sides of the story was transformed into an inaccurate hatchet job. The article was headlined UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim [now behind a paywall on the Times' site]. It claimed that the 40% claim:

"was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise".

It created the impression that Dr Lewis endorsed this view. As he points out:

"following this telephone call the article was entirely and completely re-written with an entirely new focus, new quotes from me included and new (incorrect) assertions of my views."

The new version bore strong similarities to Richard North's concoction. At the bottom of the Sunday Times piece were the words

"Research by Richard North."

Needless to say, the Sunday Times article reignited the false controversy North had sparked, and was reproduced on denialist blogs all over the world.

When the article was published, Lewis posted a comment on the thread, pointing out that it had misrepresented his views and that the rainforest claim was not bogus. His comment was deleted. He wrote a letter for publication in the paper. It was ignored.

But the Sunday Times was messing with the wrong man. Lewis wrote what should become the template for a submission to the Press Complaints Commission. He laid out the case clearly and simply, compared the paper's behaviour to the commission's code and provided reams of evidence, including his email correspondence with Jonathan Leake and the newspaper. The University of East Anglia, which has written the textbook on how not to handle a crisis, has a lot to learn from him.

The commission is notoriously reluctant to rule against a newspaper, but Lewis's submission was incontestable. To avoid an adverse ruling, the Sunday Times had no option but to publish a total retraction of its story, on page 2 of last Sunday's edition. In doing so it was obliged to admit that the paper's account – and by inference North's almost identical treatment – was rubbish from top to toe. The deniers' greatest triumph has turned into a total rout.

But the interesting question is how the Sunday Times messed up so badly. I spent much of yesterday trying to get some sense out of the paper, without success. But after 25 years in journalism it looks pretty obvious to me that Jonathan Leake has been wrongly blamed for this, then hung out to dry. My guess is that someone else at the paper, acting on instructions from an editor, got hold of Leake's copy after he had submitted it, and rewrote it, drawing on North's post, to produce a different – and more newsworthy – story. If this is correct, it suggests that Leake is carrying the can for an editor's decision. The Sunday Times has made no public attempt to protect him: it looks to me like corporate cowardice.

To test this hypothesis, I rang the paper's managing editor, Richard Caseby, and asked him what happened between Jonathan Leake reading his copy to Simon Lewis and the article going to press.

"We're not going to make any comment on this story."

I said: "It seems to me that you've left Jonathan Leake to take the rap for this, when someone else at the Sunday Times was at fault."

"I've got no comment to make to you on anything."

This was delivered in a surprisingly aggressive tone, which suggested to me that I might have touched a nerve.

The ironies of this episode are manifold, but the most obvious is this: that North's story – and the Sunday Times's rewritten account – purported to expose inaccuracy, misrepresentation and falsehood on the part of the IPCC. Now that the IPCC has been vindicated, its accusers, North first among them, are exposed for peddling inaccuracy, misrepresentation and falsehood. Ashes to ashes, toast to toast

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/jun/24/sunday-times-amazongate-ipcc