Dems demand climate chapter be returned to influential judicial science manual so it’s ‘impartial’

A group of Democrats is leading a charge to reinstate a chapter on climate science that was included in an influential manual given to thousands of judges across the country. The chapter was removed after critics argued it contained citations to activist researchers who advocate for lawsuits against oil companies. 

The manual is intended to be an impartial resource for judges, but it could bias those overseeing climate cases, the critics argued. 

The coalition of Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, wrote to Judge Robin Rosenberg, director of the Federal Judiciary Center, to argue that the decision to remove the chapter was the result of Republican pressure. This, the Democrats wrote, creates a “chilling message that the federal judiciary is susceptible to partisan political pressure by Republicans.” 

The lawmakers want the federal judiciary to instead be susceptible to Democratic partisan political pressure, and they are demanding the omitted material be reinstated. 

Critics get questionable chapter removed

In coordination with the National Academy of Sciences, the Federal Judiciary Center (FJC) publishes the “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.” The FJC provides the manual to over 3,000 judges, and it’s been cited in over 1,700 opinions. The Supreme Court has also relied upon the manual multiple times as an authority to cite in explaining principles in science and math.

In December, the FJC released its first update of the manual in 15 years, and it contained a chapter dealing with climate science. The chapter not only included citations to climate advocacy writings, but also an attorney who works at a law firm, Shel Edling, which is deeply involved in potentially profitable climate litigation against oil companies. 

Among the activists whose work is cited in the manual is Dr. Michael Mann, who was ordered in January to pay two bloggers he’d sued for libel. After Mann won a million-dollar settlement against the bloggers, a D.C. judge ruled that Mann exaggerated the financial losses he claimed to have suffered as a result of the bloggers’ writings and ordered Mann to pay for some of their legal costs. 

“The fact that judges around the United States are reading this information, thinking it's an unbiased training manual — without any disclaimers that the people that have their fingerprints all over it are involved in climate cases that could come before those judges — it’s appalling,” Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute, told Just the News. 

Last month, 22 GOP state attorneys general wrote to the FJC asking the material be removed. They argued that the material on climate science doesn’t adhere to the FJC’s purpose of the manual, which is to “describe the basic principles of major scientific fields” without instructing judges about what “evidence should be admissible.” 

Instead of addressing undisputed scientific principles, the letter states, the material is predisposed toward one side of many debated and yet-unanswered questions concerning the science of climate change and the attribution of extreme weather to global warming.

Judge Rosenberg responded to the complaint within about a week and said the chapter had been “omitted” from the manual. 

Wyden has connections to climate lawyer

In the same way the climate chapter is connected to climate activists, Sen. Wyden has his own connections to an attorney involved in climate litigation. Records from the Federal Exchange Commission show that Roger Worthington, owner of the firm Worthington & Caron, has donated $11,000 to Wyden’s campaigns since 2015. 

Worthington is the lead attorney representing Multnomah County, Oregon, in its lawsuit against oil companies, claiming they caused a heatwave event in 2021, which didn’t break state temperature records but was associated with 72 deaths. 

In October, the county received a stern rebuke from an Oregon court for failing to disclose that Worthington may have been involved with research that the county submitted in support of its case. Worthington has also been linked to other scientific research that supports climate litigants’ claims. 

In 2022, Wyden and Jeffrey Merkley, the other Democratic Oregon senator, responded to a series of questions Worthington had posed to them on environmental issues. Among the questions Worthington asked was if the senators supported protections for old-growth trees “during a climate emergency.” 

“We strongly agreed with the need to protect mature and old growth trees and forests long before we knew there was a climate emergency,” the senators replied. 

In 2021, Wyden included a quote from Worthington in support of a bill that he and Merkley had introduced to protect rivers from dams and development. 

“I applaud Senator Wyden's legislation to increase protections for Oregon's cherished rivers as good news for beer, business, outdoor recreation, and climate change,” Worthington’s endorsement of the legislation stated. Worthington also owns a brewery in Oregon. 

Neutrality advocates aren't neutral parties

The senators’ belief in a “climate emergency” and the association with an attorney involved in climate litigation suggests their aims in pushing to get the climate chapter added back into the FJC manual may not be entirely out of a concern over the impartiality of the material, as they state in their letter. 

Researchers who contributed to the chapter have also objected to having it removed. Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, each connected with climate studies programs at Columbia University, wrote a defense of their work on the chapter. The pair, however, are not neutral researchers. They co-authored a paper that advocates for litigation as a means to advance climate policy, which hasn’t been successful through legislative bodies. 

The authors state that the “political sphere in the United States continues to be clouded with false debates over the validity of climate science. The issue appears far clearer in the courtroom, where to our knowledge no judge has questioned the scientific basis for the global community’s shared understanding of the causes and effects of climate change.” 

Contrary to the assertion of the authors, climate science is full of uncertainties and nuance, especially when it comes to the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions on extreme weather. 

Researcher: ghostwriters violate scientific integrity

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., a climate researcher and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues on his "The Honest Broker" Substack that the chapter's use of ghost authors is a violation of publication ethics, and he notes that the Committee on Publication Ethics treats the practice as a form of research misconduct. 

One of the ghost authors is Micheal Burger, who is counsel for the city of Honolulu in its ongoing litigation against energy companies, seeking damages it alleges the companies have caused. Burger is also of counsel with the law firm Sher Edling, the firm representing many plaintiffs in climate lawsuits across the country. 

Using A.I., Pielke demonstrated that significant parts of the chapter were taken directly from a study Burger co-authored in 2020. Despite being a key author of the chapter, he's not listed. 

"Regardless of who Michael Burger is — or what any of us think about climate change or climate litigation — ghost authorship is a violation of scientific integrity. But who Michael Burger actually is makes this much, much worse," Pielke wrote. 

Jessica Weinkle, associate professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, explains in Civitas Outlook that the problems in the chapter go beyond its slant toward climate advocacy. It fails to admit that science doesn’t produce policy outcomes with an infallible formula. 

“Those outcomes emerge from deliberation and judgment about competing resources and goals of the political community,” Weinkle wrote. The attitudes the climate chapter promotes are symptomatic of a growing distrust of science, she argues. 

Weinkle calls for a full public account of what happened to produce the manual, including who was involved and how their decisions were made. 

Not over yet

Isaac points out that the fourth edition of the manual remains with the climate chapter intact on the National Academy of Sciences' version. The academy and the FJC are both taxpayer-funded organizations. 

The effort to get the chapter returned to the manual may reflect a growing concern about whether climate litigation can succeed through neutral judicial proceedings. The Supreme Court agreed last week to review a lower court ruling that gave a green-light to a lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colorado. And so far, several cases at the state level have been dismissed over concerns about whether local governments can address global emissions through state-level torts. 

While some Democrat lawmakers are pushing to get the chapter returned to the manual, critics of the material are hoping to get more answers about how it ended up in the manual update in the first place. 

“I won't be satisfied until Congress investigates how this happened, and they need to rescind the entire fourth edition of the manual itself,” Isaac said. 

Kevin Killough is the energy reporter for Just The News. You can follow him on X for more coverage.