The revelation was overlooked first time round by the mainstream media as it broke during the deluge to cover the Pachaurigate and Glaciergate stories. The London Times reports:

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the IPCC from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

“The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.”

The fabrication was discovered by the UK group Climate Resistance as it was fact-checking an Oxfam publication.

In a guest post at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog, Ben Pile explained,

There is only limited discussion of “deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture” in that paper, and its focus is not ‘some’ African countries, but just three: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. It is not climate research. It is a discussion about the possible effects of climate change.

This will no doubt again make no impression on IPCC’s head honcho and the “world’s leading climatologist” Rajendra Pachauri, who has more important tasks in hand such as peddling his latest soft porn offering, Return to Almora, published in Dr Pachauri’s native India last month.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team told the Times:

“I was not an author on the Synthesis Report but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”

But as a devastating twist, we can add a postscript to the plot as reported by that superb blog, eureferendum:

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this “50 percent by 2020″ claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.