The Federal Judicial Center in conjunction with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published for the first time late last year a Reference Guide on Climate Science as part of the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, intended “to assist judges in understanding relevant scientific methods and principles that may arise in their [climate litigation] cases.”
The actual intent of the Guide is blatantly obvious: to bias judges in favor of the climate alarmism stance and the plaintiffs suing fossil energy producers. That is why Congressmen Jim Jordan and Darrell Issa of the House Judiciary Committee late last month sent a letter to Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School, requesting information about whether the Sabin Center — where one of the co-authors of the Guide is a fellow — has “coordinated with parties involved in climate-related litigation, or ha[s] developed judicial education programs designed to advance the interests of such parties.”
It is an important question not merely because the Guide shunts aside the massive scientific complexities and uncertainties afflicting the assertion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have created important adverse effects, and that fossil energy and the fossil producers are responsible for them. The Guide hides its biases and conflicts of interest, and makes arguments inconsistent with mainstream science even as it claims the reverse.
Hidden authorship. The government watchdog, the Oversight Project, found that nearly a quarter of the Guide was copied — literally — from a 2020 paper, “The Law and Science of Climate Change Attribution,” the first listed author of which is Burger, who in addition to his role at the Sabin Center also is an attorney at the Sher Edling law firm (“Protecting People and the Planet”). Roger Pielke Jr. in a separate analysis concludes that the relevant overlap is over forty percent. Given the obvious copy-and-paste reliance of the Guide on the 2020 paper, Burger should have been listed as a co-author. The Guide fails to do so.
Blatant conflicts of interest. Nowhere in the Guide is it acknowledged that Sher Edling is the law firm representing most of the cities and counties now pursuing litigation against the fossil energy producers. Nor does the Guide note that the stated mission of the Sabin Center is the “develop[ment of] legal techniques to combat the climate crisis and advance climate justice….” That is why the Sabin Center receives financial support from such advocates of climate alarmism as the ClimateWorks Foundation (“Accelerating climate solutions for people and our planet”) and the Rockefeller Family Fund (“Limit Climate Change & Hold Polluters Accountable”).
How “settled” is the science? The authors of the Guide cannot decide. In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, one of the authors of the Guide stated that “The [Guide] is objective and rooted in settled science.” That is an unqualified assertion that all or most of the arguments in the Guide are scientifically “settled,” a preposterous notion in part because “settled science” is a contradiction in terms. But in a lengthy response to a letter from twenty-seven state Attorneys
General demanding that the Guide be withdrawn, the authors of the Guide admit that “The anthropogenic origin of climate change is the only scientific finding on climate change that the chapter presents as a ‘settled’ fact. The chapter does not suggest that other aspects of climate science have been ‘unequivocally’ established.” So which is it?
Climate attribution “science.” The Burger paper asserts explicitly that attribution “science” — the argument that specific weather events can be “attributed” to GHG emissions generally and even to such emissions from specific industries or producers — can be used in climate litigation. Such attribution borders on the fraudulent; it is “not scientifically possible.” The basic reason for this impossibility is that climate models have enormous difficulty merely distinguishing the effects of natural influences from anthropogenic (“manmade”) factors when used to explain the causes of changes in broad, long-term climate phenomena.
Because specific weather events — statistically, a single observation — are driven by a complex mix of innumerable factors, they cannot be explained statistically. A given combination of factors might produce a given weather event, and a different combination of factors might do the same. Single statistical observations cannot be “explained” as the result of several factors. Sherman, Huybers, and Tziperman note also that the data for extreme weather events are not available over a time period sufficient to observe repeated specific weather events so as to allow for statistical analysis.
The Guide asserts (pp. 1605-1606) that “scientific confidence in extreme-event attribution has advanced significantly…,” implying that this is the position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That is false. IPCC argues not that attribution analysis is useful but that analysis of overall trends in climate phenomena suggests that an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events is likely as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG. But IPCC cautions (p. 108) that “… the events that have been studied are not representative of all extreme events that have occurred, and results from these studies may also be subject to selection bias…” And (p. 1611): “Scientists cannot answer directly whether a particular event was caused by climate change, as extremes do occur naturally, and any specific weather and climate event is the result of a complex mix of human and natural factors.”
Because of intense criticism by both policymakers and observers of the Guide, the FJC withdrew it, while the NASEM has preserved it. This reflects the mounting scrutiny of the Guide, as it remains available as a deeply mendacious primer for the judiciary. As Congressmen Jordan and Issa recognize, a continued focus on its hidden authorship, conflicts of interest, and preposterous assertions is wholly appropriate.
