The nation’s top scientific body has removed a chapter on climate science from a reference manual for judges after an outcry from critics on the right, including President Trump.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said Friday that it had “determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway.”
The chapter appeared in the fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which was produced in partnership with the Federal Judicial Center and was released last year. The 1,700-page manual covers many different topics and is intended to help judges understand science and technology that might come up in cases. Other subjects covered in the manual include eyewitness identification, toxicology and neuroscience.
Climate change is figuring into a growing number of legal cases, including lawsuits against oil companies over their role in global warming, as well as other cases involving government regulations, natural disasters, insurance claims, land use and the energy industry. The now-deleted chapter was the manual’s first foray into climate science.
The Federal Judicial Center, which is a government agency, removed the chapter from its website in February after criticism from Republican attorneys general and other officials. The National Academies, which operates as a private scientific advisory body under a congressional charter, declined to do so at the time.
In a separate development last month, the National Academies issued a report on a type of research known as attribution science, a growing field that examines whether specific extreme-weather events, such as a particular storm or flood, were intensified or made more likely by climate change. The report concluded that research of this type was getting more sophisticated and yielding better data.
Three days after that report was released, President Trump launched a broadside against the National Academies, writing on Truth Social that the organization was run by “Radical Left Dumocrats” and that taxpayers should not be funding “climate fraud.” He called for a review of its funding.
As of Monday, the chapter in the judges’ manual had been taken off National Academies’ website and replaced with a short paragraph explaining that it had received “considerable scrutiny.”
In a statement, the National Academies said its review “is about the process used to produce the chapter and not about the validity of climate science. The focus is on our own procedures and whether they were adequate to ensure the highest standard of objectivity that this institution requires and our nation deserves.”
There is broad scientific consensus that global warming is being caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases act as a blanket, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the world.
It was unclear how long the review might last.
The chapter was written by two experts affiliated with Columbia University: Jessica Wentz, a legal scholar, and Radley Horton, an earth and environmental scientist. Critics, including four former U.S. attorneys general, accused them of being “climate-litigation activists.”
The former attorneys general pointed to similarities between the chapter and a previous article that the authors co-wrote with Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, who has worked on the plaintiff’s side on several lawsuits by local governments against oil companies. He is affiliated with Sher Edling, a law firm that works on many of those cases.
Mr. Burger and Ms. Wentz declined to comment. Mr. Horton and Sher Edling did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
In an interview with The New York Times in February, Ms. Wentz said she and Mr. Horton had endeavored to make the chapter a “neutral but comprehensive assessment of the science” and that it had undergone an extensive peer-review process.
In late February, Ms. Wentz and Mr. Horton also responded to the criticisms from Republican leaders in a 10-page document. They disputed their critics’ characterization of their work and wrote that the fact that climate change is being caused by human activity was the only scientific finding the chapter presented as a settled conclusion. They said the chapter acknowledged “varying degrees of scientific uncertainty and confidence with regards to the detection, attribution, and projection of different types of climate impacts.”
Democratic leaders and contributors to other parts of the manual had strongly criticized the decision by the Federal Judicial Center to delete the chapter. In a letter published in March, 28 authors called the campaign to remove the climate chapter “a direct challenge to the independence of the federal judiciary and an attack on a thoroughly vetted exposition of climate science.”
The House Judiciary Committee is also investigating the manual as part of a broader inquiry into judicial training on climate science.
