Just when you thought that all of the IPCC screw-ups have been accounted for, a brand new one springs up.

The IPCC reported that that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically from the slightest reduction of rainfall to be replaced by savannas. The UN Climate gurus based their claim on a World Wildlife Fund study.

A new study fielded by NASA showed the WWF report to be wrong.

“The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct,” said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC.

This new NASA-funded study concluded that Amazon rain forests were  unaffected in the face of the 2005 “Drought of the Century” The rain forests did not die (or flourish) which runs contra to claims by the IPCC.

“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston University.

The comprehensive study published in the current issue of the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters [and embedded below] used the latest version of the NASA MODIS satellite data to measure the greenness of these vast pristine forests over the past decade.

A study published in the journal Science in 2007 claimed that these forests actually thrive from drought because of more sunshine under cloud-less skies typical of drought conditions. The new study found that those results were flawed and not reproducible.


“This new study brings some clarity to our muddled understanding of how these forests, with their rich source of biodiversity, would fare in the future in the face of twin pressures from logging and changing climate,” said Boston University Prof. Ranga Myneni, senior author of the new study.

“Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall,” said Sangram Ganguly, an author on the new study, from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute affiliated with NASA Ames Research Center in California.

“The way that the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while [the new] calculations are by far more reliable and correct,” said Dr. Jose Marengo, a Brazilian National Institute for Space Research climate scientist and member of the IPCC.

Sorry Al Gore, but that little nest egg you were building based on the Global Warming Hoax is getting fried. For the science wonks, the full study is embedded below.

2009GL042154