Simon Lewis

Kudos to Simon Lewis for forcing a retraction from the Sunday Times of the bogus Jonathan Leake story: The Sunday Times and the IPCC: Correction The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an "unsubstantiated claim" that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for WWF by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as "green campaigners" with "little…
Simon Lewis has made an official complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about Jonathan Leake's dishonest reporting on the Amazon rainforests. David Adam reports: Lewis said: "There is currently a war of disinformation about climate change-related science, and my complaint can hopefully let journalists in the front line of this war know that there are potential repercussions if they publish misleading stories. The public deserve careful and accurate science reporting." ... Lewis also complains that the Sunday Times used several quotes from him in the piece to support the assertion that…
Back in 2007 a paper, Amazon Forests Green-Up During 2005 Drought, was published in Science: Coupled climate-carbon cycle models suggest that Amazon forests are vulnerable to both long- and short-term droughts, but satellite observations showed a large-scale photosynthetic green-up in intact evergreen forests of the Amazon in response to a short, intense drought in 2005. These findings suggest that Amazon forests, although threatened by human-caused deforestation and fire and possibly by more severe long-term droughts, may be more resilient to climate changes than ecosystem models assume.…
They have been some explosive new revelations in the Leakegate scandal. Remember how Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the IPCC statement about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was correct? Leake didn't report what Nepstad told him. Instead he claimed that the IPCC statement was "bogus", even though he knew it wasn't. Deltoid can now reveal that Leake's reporting was far more dishonest than originally believed. This is how Leake quoted Simon Lewis: Simon…