Leake, who had extensive communications with the man, however, presents a completely different picture. This is the same Simon Lewis cited by the BBC's Roger Harrabin, who has him say: 'The IPCC statement is basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced.' The detail is familiar to readers of this blog, and some might note a small addition at the end of the piece which says: 'Research by Richard North', in what has been a fruitful partnership.Ĭrucially, Leake brings to the table the substance of an exchange with Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology.

This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study. They had based their 'research' (Leake's quotations) on a study published in Nature which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This is 'Amazongate' writ large, where the IPCC launched the scare story that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland – and the source turns out to be a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. It tells us that a 'startling report' in the IPCC report claiming that that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest 'was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.'

From Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times we get an article headed: 'UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim,' - one of several on climate change in today's edition

Tropico 6 the referendum