“Another WWF assisted IPCC claim debunked: Amazon more drought resistant than claimed“. Anthony Watts brings a NASA-funded study to our attention. This is a pretty lousy conspiracy if we can’t even count on NASA to play along! I’m getting nervous; it’s four down, 4,996 to go. [2010-03-14 update: see the bottom for how Anthony actually gets this 100% wrong]

The Amazon! Still green.

“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.

What? Even a “member of the IPCC” can’t stay on message? This sucks! This is turning into objective science, with new analyses not guaranteed to support the secret government’s agenda! What if my paychecks start bouncing?

2010-03-14 Update: Tim Lambert at Deltoid shows that Anthony’s take is completely wrong. Maybe the actual report title, “Amazon forests did not green‐up during the 2005 drought” is a bit of a give-away! My bad, I didn’t have time to follow through. Another quote from the actual paper:

We find no evidence of large-scale greening of intact Amazon forests during the 2005 drought.

2010-03-16 Update: RealClimate has also discussed this in detail now, Anthony is even more wrong than I first thought!

2010-03-19 Update: Rabett Run reports that nineteen experienced Amazon scientists are also calling out the false representation of the study results.