When the Federal Judicial Center quietly pulled a controversial climate science chapter from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence last month, it might have hoped the story would go away. It hasn’t.
The Reference Manual is the judiciary’s go-to guide for complex scientific questions – cited in over 1,700 opinions and relied on by more than 3,000 federal judges. The climate science chapter, added for the first time in the manual’s fourth edition, drew immediate criticism for presenting contested scientific theories central to ongoing climate litigation as settled fact.
New reporting and independent research are filling in the picture of how the chapter was developed – and the findings raise serious questions about who actually wrote it, and why the National Academy of Sciences is still hosting it on its website.
A Ghost Writer with a Financial Interest
Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, used AI to compare the FJC chapter against a 2020 paper co-authored by Michael Burger – of counsel at Sher Edling, the dark money-funded law firm representing plaintiffs in climate nuisance lawsuits across the country, and counsel of record for Honolulu in its active climate lawsuit. The chapter’s two named authors, Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton, were also co-authors on that same 2020 paper.
His findings: 860 words from the FJC manual’s section on extreme event attribution matched Burger’s paper word-for-word, and with a fuzzy match of 47.8% across the section as a whole. Despite the heavy reliance on Burger’s work, he is not listed as an author of the FJC chapter. He’s only listed as a reviewer.
In a March 13 editorial on the episode, the Wall Street Journal editorial board stated firmly that misleading readers – judges, no less – about conflicts of interest is “ethically unacceptable” under scientific publication standards.
Burger is not the only one. Elizabeth Cabraser, a prominent plaintiffs’ attorney, sits on the FJC Foundation’s board while simultaneously billing the California $1,241 per hour as outside counsel in its own climate nuisance lawsuit.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has funded the dark money Collective Action Fund that in turn pays Sher Edling to sue American energy companies, also provided financial support for the manual’s development.
In short, there is no daylight between the people who wrote and funded this chapter, and the people who stand to benefit from its use in the courtroom.
NAS Is Still Hosting the Chapter — Under the FJC’s Name
After the FJC announced the chapter would be “omitted,” the expectation was that it would come down. At the National Academy of Sciences, it didn’t. NAS, which collaborated with the FJC on the latest edition of the manual, continues to host the chapter on its website.
Even with the added disclaimer noting the FJC’s removal, that means judges can still easily reference the chapter.
In February, 21 state attorneys general led by Montana AG Austin Knudsen called on NAS to take the chapter down, writing that it “undermines the constitutional guarantee to an independent and impartial judiciary.”
NAS president Marcia McNutt, however, stood by the chapter, arguing in a WSJ op-ed that the “draft chapter was reviewed by an oversight committee that included judges and scientists and was further evaluated by a different group of judges and scientists serving as anonymous, expert peer reviewers.”
As former Attorney General Bill Barr noted in the Washington Post, the reviewer list tells a different story:
“A quick glance at the list of reviewers puts that contention to rest. Among others, it includes Donald Wuebbles, a climate plaintiff expert witness, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, co-founder of the notoriously biased FactCheck.org, and some of the most liberal judges in the country, such as James Wynn, who rescinded his plans to retire after Donald Trump won in 2024.”
Both the FJC and NAS are taxpayer-funded. The National Science Foundation issued an $874,752 grant to NAS specifically to help produce the FJC Reference Manual.
On March 11, Knudsen and 23 fellow AGs sent a second letter — this time to Secretaries Hegseth, Duffy, and Wright — calling for federal funding to NAS to be suspended or terminated. Congress is now weighing whether NAS is using its federally chartered status to keep circulating biased material the FJC itself chose to remove.
A Wider Pattern of Outside Influence
The roots of this effort to directly influence the judiciary go back to 2018, when U.S. District Judge William Alsup presided over a climate nuisance case brought by Oakland and San Francisco against major energy companies.
Alsup held an unusual five-hour “climate science tutorial” – and then dismissed the climate lawsuit. Soon afterward, climate activists and their funders began working to get in front of judges before cases reach the courtroom, rather than during proceedings.
That same year, the Environmental Law Institute launched its Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) with financial backing from the very same foundations funding climate plaintiffs’ lawyers.
Reporting last week from the Washington Free Beacon shows the CJP hosted multi-day seminars on plaintiff-friendly climate science for judges in Napa Valley, Palm Beach, and Hawaii. Judges who participated were reportedly asked to commit to year-long involvement – conferences, online coursework, and recruiting other judges into the program.
Organizers reportedly tracked participating judges and targeted recruitment in states with active climate litigation, including Colorado, whose climate case the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this fall.
Some events were reportedly classified as continuing legal education through partnerships with the FJC and the National Judicial College – a designation that can exempt judges from standard disclosure requirements for privately funded travel.
Bottom Line
The more scrutiny this story gets, the more connections surface. As University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Jessica Weinkle has argued, restoring trust in core judicial and scientific institutions will require a full public accounting – who was involved, what decisions were made, and how. Congress has the authority to demand exactly that.
