The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) has released a major report on climate attribution science that acknowledges that the science continues to face “significant challenges” while accepting help from litigation supporters that appears to violate the Academies’ conflict of interest policies.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board and the Washington Free Beacon highlighted that the NAS report was heavily influenced by Michael Burger, an academic at Columbia University who serves as Of Counsel to Sher Edling and a counsel of record in Honolulu’s climate lawsuit.
Just days after the report was released, President Trump took to Truth Social, calling for the NAS to be reviewed by Federal Suspension and Debarment officials after a separate scandal involving Burger and the NAS and Federal Judicial Center.
The Acknowledgments Don’t Lie
Beyond the admission of the challenges facing the science, the report’s “Acknowledgments” section explicitly cites an extensive lineup of litigation supporters who “assisted the committee … to create this report.”
This includes Burger who, in November 2024, presented to the NAS attribution committee on legal contexts for the science despite the fact that his work for Sher Edling could result in multi-million-dollar payouts to the firm.
The NAS report never discloses this legal and financial conflict-of-interest from Burger.
Delta Merner, who leads the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate Accountability Campaign also served on the NAS committee, guiding the report’s development until January 2025.
Further, the report never discloses that Delta Merner served on the committee itself through January 2, 2025 despite her role as Lead Scientist for the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at UCS. In April, Merner wrote a blog touting attribution science as a tool for litigation:
“For litigators and their clients, attribution research helps establish connections between emissions, climate change, and specific harms—evidence for courts to weigh in the context of legal standards that vary by jurisdiction and claim type.
Jessica Wentz, a senior fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center, was also featured in the acknowledgments, and she faced criticism for co-authoring the now-rescinded climate science chapter in the Federal Judicial Center’s reference manual, which is supposed to provide unbiased scientific information for judges.
Also in the acknowledgments is Michael Wehner, who serves as an expert for the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) and faced criticism after he shared a non-public draft of a manual used to train judges with Roger Worthington, an attorney representing Multnomah County, OR in its climate lawsuit. Worthington was recently subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, in part, over his involvement with the CJP.
Further, one of the report’s own authors, Dr. Joyce Kimutai, told an audience at Columbia University in June that it should be easier to use climate attribution science in court, while seemingly failing to understand the U.S. legal system:
“I think the bar is too high on our side…I think we should flip the burden of proof, to go to the defendants.”
The influence from these litigation supporters appears to be a direct violation of NAS’s conflict-of-interest policy to develop and communicate its advice “free from undue influence from sponsors, donors, or other interested parties.”
Yet, despite these blatant efforts by litigation supporters to influence and leverage the report to advance their goals, the NAS is still not prepared to put its full confidence in attribution science.
Admission of Limits
The NAS has clearly admitted there are significant limits to climate attribution science and its applications and that much more work is required to provide confidence. In a press release announcing the report’s release, James Hurrell, chair of the NAS committee stated:
“But the field still faces challenges, and addressing them is necessary to fully realize the value of attribution science. We hope our recommendations will guide those efforts.”
The NAS press release further states:
“Confidence in [extreme event attribution] study results varies significantly across different types of extremes…The field still faces challenges, and addressing them is necessary to fully realize the value of attribution science.”
This is just the latest acknowledgment in a long string of comments that climate attribution continues to face hurdles in the plaintiffs’ attempt to leverage it in litigation. Since climate attribution science was identified as a key part of the coordinated climate lawfare campaign at the Rockefeller-funded conference in La Jolla, the science has not caught up with the activists’ ambitions. The conference’s own report from 2012 admitted:
“Many challenges are involved in these kinds of linkages, from getting the science right to communicating it effectively.” (emphasis added)
Nearly a decade later in 2021, attribution researcher Friederike Otto and other researchers admitted that attribution science was failing in the courtroom,
“However, plaintiffs have been unable to overcome even the more flexible causation tests applied in several jurisdictions which ask if damages are ‘fairly traceable’ to defendants’ actions. This is typically due to courts’ finding that the evidence provided does not substantiate the connection between individual emitters’ actions and plaintiffs’ losses. …Our analysis shows that when courts considered evidence on causation, they typically found that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that defendants’ emissions caused the alleged impacts.” (emphasis added)
Another five years later, and despite the efforts of Sher Edling and the Union of Concerned Scientists, the NAS report states that there are still “significant challenges” ahead, providing yet another obstacle for the nationally-coordinated climate litigation campaign.
Bottom Line: Despite efforts by Michael Burger and Delta Merner to influence the NAS report, the reality is that climate attribution continues to face serious challenges. Climate attribution, which was specifically developed to support litigation, continues to face an uphill battle and new reports, mired in apparent conflicts of interest, are not helping the case.
