Back on February 16, The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote of “news that an [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group.” The Journal cited a January U.K. Sunday Times article by Jonathan Leake and reported:

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.”

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, “did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning.”

And in a February 22 WSJ column, L. Gordon Crovitz used the Sunday Times' reporting to similarly claim that the World Wildlife Foundation was “the basis for a claim the IPCC has backed away from -- that up to 40% of the Amazon is endangered.”

The problem? The claim made by the Sunday Times -- and repeated by the Journal -- that the IPCC was wrong about Amazon forests was false. And now The Sunday Times has finally corrected its reporting.

As Media Matters has noted, the IPCC's statement on the Amazon and drought was indeed correct. In fact, the scientists at RealClimate disputed the Sunday Times' initial reporting on the issue even before the Journal ran with it.

On June 20, The Sunday Times issued a correction regarding Leake's article. The New York Times reported on June 20 that “The Sunday Times published a correction of crucial elements of its article from January" and that The Sunday Times “acknowledged that the conclusion about the Amazon was supported by peer-reviewed evidence.”

Now that the The Sunday Times has officially corrected the record, the Journal owes it to its readers to do the same.