Scientists, engineers, lawyers, statisticians and other experts sounded the alarm Monday about the recent decision to remove a chapter on climate science from an influential reference manual designed to help judges understand complex scientific evidence.
For more than 30 years, federal judges have turned to the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence for guidance on interpreting complex scientific issues in their courtrooms. The reference, originally published by the Federal Judicial Center, which was established by Congress in 1994 as a research and education agency for the judicial branch, is now co-published with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
On Jan. 29, a coalition of 27 Republican attorneys general wrote to the Federal Judicial Center, urging the center to “immediately withdraw” the chapter on climate science from the manual’s fourth edition, claiming it was biased and “rife with methodology issues.”
Accuracy and impartiality of the manual is vital, West Virginia Attorney General John B. McCuskey, who led the effort, posted that same day. “However, the newly added ‘Reference Manual on Climate Science’ chapter was written by authors who are connected to university climate studies programs that promote legal warfare against States and energy producers to push their left leaning political agendas.”
Eight days later, the center informed the Republican attorneys general that it “omitted the climate science chapter” from the reference manual’s latest edition. The climate science chapter remains on the National Academies’ website.
Experts who contributed other chapters to the more than 1,600-page scientific reference manual, now in its fourth edition, were outraged to see politicians with no scientific expertise target science that didn’t align with their agendas.
“In January and February this year, that project took a troubling turn, in which partisan politics interfered with the latest edition of that handbook,” 28 authors from that volume wrote in an open letter published on Monday in Science Politics, founded last year by Georgetown University’s Science, Technology, and International Affairs Program.
The reference manual has been a valuable independent and educational resource for federal and state court judges, who have cited it more than 1,300 times, the authors wrote in the letter. “The political attack by the attorneys general on a carefully and rigorously prepared scientific publication should concern us all.”
The climate science chapter was the target this time, but it doesn’t matter which chapter it is, said Brenda Eskenazi, an environmental health expert at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, who co-authored the manual’s chapter on epidemiology.
“If I tell you how much peer review we went through, how much anonymous review, how much vetting we went through for each of the chapters, and then for some 27 politicians to come in and say, ‘No, we don’t accept this science,’ is just appalling,” Eskenazi said. “It’s appalling that this could become something political when it’s really about science, unbiased science. If it was biased, that would have been called out in all of the reviews.”
The Federal Judicial Center did not respond to requests for comment on the decision to remove the chapter on climate science.
Removing the climate science chapter “is absurd,” said Hank Greely, a bioethicist and director of Stanford University’s Program in Neuroscience and Society, who co-authored the chapter on neuroscience. “It’s part of the partisan denial that anything about climate change could be at all real.”
Greely called it “deeply annoying” to see political interference affect a reference manual that has been a useful resource not just for federal and state court judges but also for the attorneys who practice before them.
“I am pleased the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has not taken the chapter out,” said Greely, who has used the neuroscience chapter from the manual in his classes.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which says it “speaks for free markets,” was not pleased. On Monday, the journal’s editorial board objected to the academies’ decision to retain the chapter as allowing the center’s “biased crusade” to live on, echoing the Republican attorneys general’s defense of domestic energy producers.
Last week, Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to the Federal Judicial Center, calling its “decision to capitulate to right-wing pressure and remove this chapter … unconscionable,” and demanding that it be reinstated.
The chapter’s co-authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, posted a response to the Republican attorneys general on Feb. 25. The attorneys general claimed that the climate science chapter would undermine judicial “impartiality” by offering “conclusive opinions on matters of serious dispute,” wrote Wentz, a legal expert at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and Horton, a Columbia University climate scientist.
Among the findings the attorneys general objected to are that human activities “unequivocally warmed the climate” and that it is “extremely likely” human influence drives ocean warming. Yet both are direct references to findings issued by authoritative science bodies, including the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Wentz and Horton wrote.
“Both concluded that there is ‘unequivocal’ evidence that human activities have warmed the climate, resulting in widespread changes to the atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere,” Wentz and Horton said in their response.
“Omitting the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual deprives judges of a carefully reviewed baseline explanation of the relevant science,” the experts who signed the open letter argued. “It leaves judges without a tool to evaluate the parties’ framing, sometimes cherry-picked literature and adversarially hired and paid witnesses.”
Ultimately, they concluded, “If political actors can determine which fields of established science are disfavored and off-limits to judicial education, every scientific discipline relevant to complex litigation becomes vulnerable to the same tactic.”
The fact that the National Academies’ version of the reference manual is still on its websites mitigates the harmful effects of the Federal Judicial Center’s decision, said Greely. “But as another example of inappropriate politicization of science and the desire to have science say exactly what you want it to say, nothing more, nothing less, it’s offensive.”
Eskenazi hopes people understand the extensive vetting that goes into publishing a scientific resource like the judges’ reference guide.
The chapters have gone through extensive internal and external peer review, Eskenazi said. “It’s not the place of politicians to swoop in and decide that science is not to their liking.”
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Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.
